21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Metadata is the biggest little problem plaguing the music industry. “It’s a crisis that has left, by some estimations, billions on the table unpaid to musicians.”

In the music world, metadata most commonly refers to the song credits you see on services like Spotify or Apple Music, but it also includes all the underlying information tied to a released song or album, including titles, songwriter and producer names, the publisher(s), the record label, and more. That information needs to be synchronized across all kinds of industry databases to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid. And often, they aren’t.

Metadata sounds like one of the smallest, most boring things in music. But as it turns out, it’s one of the most important, complex, and broken, leaving many musicians unable to get paid for their work. “Every second that goes by and it’s not fixed, I’m dripping pennies,” said the musician, who asked to remain anonymous because of “the repercussions of even mentioning that this type of thing happens.”

As a music fan, I’ve mentioned it often. Apple Music and Spotify’s metadata is so unreliable that it breaks the “brilliant playlists” I use to arrange my collection by genre or era. You can fix it by going into the ID tag of each song file, but not only is that a pain, but your fixes don’t stick if for any reason the streaming service has to update or change the song. As a user, it wasn’t worth the effort, so I gave up on streaming.

Artists can’t afford to do that, however, now that streaming is the music publishing industry’s primary income. And that puts ripped-off artists in a real bind.