Could you imagine if you had your music or show on a cassette tape, would you label the tape before handing it out? Not filling out all of the information on an mp3 is the digital equivalent of that. My mp3 collection spans hundreds of artists and tens of thousands of songs. If those songs or albums were tapes, how could I tell your blank tape apart from all the others that I’ve been given over time? In order to stand out, you have to optimize your use of ID3 tags.

I was looking through the music on Free Music Archive .org for more podsafe music. I downloaded a few dozen tracks and loaded them into a folder. There was only one track stood out.

As musicians or podcasters, we have an opportunity to make an instant impact the moment our content is downloaded onto someone’s computer or personal media player. If you leave the artwork empty on that file, you’re missing out on an opportunity to stand out amongst a sea of blank files.

The files I downloaded were from a high level collection on the Free Music Archive’s pages. I downloaded most of the two volumes of the WFMU curated collections. I’m not sure if Clockcleaner completely understood the impact that they would have on me when they included some simple album art in the ID3 tags, but they made quite an impact. Everyone should go check out Caliente Queen by Clockcleaner for their efforts.

A little about the Free Music Archive: All of the music in the collection there is licensed for redistribution in one way or another. The Clockcleaner track from the album Babylon Rules is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. For the most part, this site seems like it has all the shiny sparkle that I hoped Muxtape would employ.

Next time you release something publicly, stop and make sure that every piece of information that can be filled out, is filled out. Each podcast I release had every possible piece of information filled out. Lyrics, comments, and everything else that you have the option to fill out NEED to be filled out. Leaving out information is leaving money on the table.

image by CoreForce via Flickr