If labels are seriously seeking to make streaming a more organic, listener-friendly experience then an easy first step would be to eliminate this practice:
(click image to expand)
All that is accomplished by appending technical ‘remaster’ information to the song title is it makes things more clinical and distracting. Not only does this show up in the album list but also on the single song title as it plays. I can assure you that no one cares about this information … I’m a big fan of both Talk Talk and Wire and I just want to hear the songs, no matter the version. I may seem nit-picky here, but this is the kind of stuff that subtly clouds the whole. Having technical notes added to the title of a favorite song reminds us that we’re participating in a digital process when we just want to get lost in the music.
If the services (and labels) really want this information out there then they could add it to the liner notes on the album’s page in the streaming app. Oh, what’s that? Liner notes aren’t available on album pages? There’s a good second step.
Note: The screenshots are from Apple Music as that’s what I use, but it is the same on Spotify (I checked) and, I assume, all the other services (I didn’t check). Thus this technical data added to song titles comes from the labels submitting album metadata across the board. It would still be nice for the streaming gods to demand this ‘remaster’ stuff be filtered out or provide the liner note option.
Leave a Reply