Best practices to enable the discoverability of your music

Who is it for?

MetaMusic is primarily intended for all rights holders in the music value chain: authors, composers, publishers, makers, record labels, performers, musicians and other creative participants (e.g. producers, sound engineers etc.). MetaMusic will guide you through the process of indexing your music, from creation to marketing.

Developed in collaboration with all actors within Québec’s music industry, MetaMusic presents the best practices for indexing music content using metadata. It comes with a toolkit that contains an exhaustive glossary of the required vocabulary to help maximize the accessibility, visibility and traceability of your music.

Producing exhaustive and standardized metadata

Following the procedure outlined by MetaMusic will allow all rights holders of a musical content to receive more rapidly all the royalties to which they are entitled, while also enabling its discoverability on digital and traditional platforms.

What is metadata?

Simply put, metadata is data that is used to document or describe digital content. For example, the date of a recording session, the title of a musical work or the name of a producer.

Metadata are not new to the digital era—the fields compiled by MetaMusic used to be found on our good old album covers! The difference between the credits printed on an album cover and metadata is that the latter can also be read by a computer.


What are metadata used for?

  • Increased search and discovery capability through applications;
  • Increased visibility of digitized catalogs and collections on the Internet;
  • Interoperability of systems for data exchange;
  • Decentralization of information.


It is the ability for a cultural content to be discovered easily by a consumer looking for it and to be offered to those who did not know about it.