The vanishing composer

Robinson Meyer, in a piece for The Atlantic on the increasingly sorry state of classical music on iTunes, points out that when the metadata system for MP3s was introduced, in 1996, it allowed for only three categories: artist, song name, and album title. From the start, this brave new world of music storage failed to acknowledge that composer and performer may not be the same — indeed, that any kind of composing was happening at all. Small wonder that composers and songwriters have seen their royalties plummet in the digital universe: their existence is erased in the architecture of the technology.

Previously: The Anxious Ease of Apple Music.