Lately I’ve been catching up with the show Empire. If you don’t know, Empire is about the dysfunctional Lyon family, headed by parents Cookie and Lucious (Taraji P. Henson and Terrance Howard respectively), who run their record label Empire while dealing with personal drama, professional rivalries, and legal problems. I lost track of the show after season 2 when we gave up cable. Fortunately, I’ve been able to request the DVDs from the library.
Since Empire is a musical show—and you know I love musicals—I’ve been collecting my favorite songs from each season via Freegal. In the course of importing the tunes into my iTunes library, I encountered several inconsistencies and formatting issues with the artist and album artist fields. That, in turn, uncovered formatting problems in other parts of my library.
Here’s a rundown of how I fixed the Empire songs and established new rules for my soundtrack albums.
The Standard Soundtrack Format
Before I jump into things, let me explain how I’ve organized my soundtracks thus far.
When it comes to a soundtrack, the two most important pieces of information are the artist and album artist fields. The artist field is generally straightforward: it’s the person or people performing the song. The album artist, on the other hand, can cover a lot of ground.
The most common album artist in my library is “Various Artists.” “Various Artists” is the generic label I use for any album that’s comprised of songs from many different artists. The majority of such albums are soundtracks, but I also have plenty of compilation albums like Now That’s What I Call Music! and WOW Gospel. In fact, iTunes sees “Various Artists” as an artist unto itself now.
Sometimes the album artist is the soundtrack’s composer or creator. That’s the case with the soundtracks for the Phantom of the Opera movie (Andrew Lloyd Webber) and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (Tan Dun & Yo-Yo Ma). In rare cases, the composer/creator is both the artist and the album artist, like when the pillows, a J-Rock band, wrote and performed the entire soundtrack for the FLCL anime.
Another album artist variation is the ensemble/cast group label. The numerous tracks I have from the show Glee have “Glee Cast” as the album artist. I’ve seen similar group labels on other albums, such as “The Greatest Showman Ensemble” for the Greatest Showman soundtrack or “Moana Cast” for the Moana soundtrack.
The Glee songs illustrate one final twist to the artist field. If the song involves a special guest star, like a celebrity or a famous real-life singer, that person’s name is added to the song title ex. “La Isla Bonita (Glee Cast version featuring Ricky Martin).” I adopted this trick for featured artists in non-soundtrack songs too.
Fixing the Format
So, that leads to my newly downloaded Empire songs. In a twist from the norm, the album artist was the more straightforward field while the artist was the mess.
Both the album artist and artist were listed as “Empire Cast.” For the artist name, however, “Empire Cast” was usually followed by a comma-separated list of the performer(s), writers, and producers. The performer(s) was also included in the song title as “Song Title (feat. X)” and in the album name for singles as “Album Title feat. X,” where X is the real name of the performer(s).
I gave the Empire songs a format consistent with the Glee ones. It seemed appropriate since both shows ran on Fox. Plus, it was easier to change 60 Empire songs than 300 Glee ones. I kept “Empire Cast” as the album artist, erased the song writer(s), and put the real name of the performer(s) as the artist. I also removed all names from the album title and appended any special guest stars’ names onto the song title.
Lastly, I filed the Empire songs in the Soundtrack genre. I usually reserve Soundtrack for movie soundtracks, but since the Empire songs come from a TV show, they qualify as soundtracks too. Truthfully, I mostly did this so I wouldn’t have to decide on genres for the different songs.
The Fallout
Fixing the Empire songs sent unexpected shock waves through my music library.
First, it illuminated an inconsistency in my Glee songs. Both the artist and album artist are listed as “Glee Cast.” Like the Empire songs, the artist should be the real name(s) of the performer(s). I can easily get that information from the liner notes in the physical CDs or Wikipedia, much as I hate to disturb this particular hornet’s nest.
Additionally, if the Empire songs are filed as Soundtrack, then the Glee songs should be too. Previously, the Glee songs were filed as Pop, with the exception of “I’m His Child” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” (Gospel) and the Christmas songs (Holiday). I changed them all to Soundtrack with the appropriate Gospel or Holiday subgenres.
I had to decide what constitutes a soundtrack in the first place too. For one thing, the genre would be called Soundtrack, not Soundtracks as some songs listed. Moreover, a song has to literally be from a soundtrack album to be filed in Soundtrack. A song that is from a movie or TV show but appears on a regular album goes into its appropriate genre.
Thus, the Dreamgirls tracks “And I Am Telling You…” and “Listen” are filed as Pop because the versions I have are from Jennifer Hudson and Beyoncé’s personal albums respectively, not from the actual Dreamgirls album. I’m considering making a Soundtrack subgenre for songs like this. For now, the songs are just tagged with the album name for smart playlist purposes.
My final task was to revise my international music rules. J-Pop and K-Pop songs from anime, video game, and drama soundtracks are now filed as Soundtrack and tagged with the appropriate J-Pop or K-Pop subgenre. I also created the K-drama subgenre for songs that are featured in Korean dramas, which is the counterpart to the existing Anime subgenre for J-Pop.
Conclusion
Even though they caused me a few headaches, I’m glad that the Empire songs helped me set things straight in my music library. Whenever I add new songs, whether they’re more Empire songs or from other soundtrack albums, I have better defined guidelines to make sure that the artist and album artist fields are formatted correctly.