Dart Music Launches Dart Data, Wants to Scrub Your Metadata
Dart Music, the fledgling digital distributor that worked to fix the broken world of classical music metadata for streaming, has gotten out of the distribution business and is focusing on expanding…
Dart Music, the fledgling digital distributor that worked to fix the broken world of classical music metadata for streaming, has gotten out of the distribution business and is focusing on expanding its metadata collection and clean-up service. A few weeks after Dart Music indicated that it would be winding down, CEO and founder Chris McMurtry has announced the creation of Dart Data to spread the start-up’s patent-pending approach to other areas beyond classical.
“This is a big step for us,” said McMurtry in a statement. “We started with the assumption that focusing on the hardest problem first would not only help classical music but the music industry at large. It’s validating and encouraging that our core technology can benefit other content as well, like books and movies.”
Dart Music launched last September with a goal to solve the shortcomings of prevalent metadata collection standards. Distributors and services, such as TuneCore or CD Baby, typically focus on data fields like artist, album and song title — fine for pop music but problematic for a genre with composers, orchestra, soloists, compositions and movements. More accurate data for classical has meant better searching for consumers and appropriate royalties for rights holders.
According to McMurtry, Dart met its goals regarding the classical genre and is ready to expand to multiple industries, minus the distribution part.
The company’s head of business development, David De Busk, explains why its service works: “Unlike ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ systems, Dart’s machine-learning techniques ensure that metadata output is perfectly formatted, ensuring efficient accounting and dramatically reducing overhead of labor-intensive manual processing of metadata.”