If you’ve ever wondered why musical metadata is so important you’re about to find out in this excellent conversation with this week’s podcast guest.

Drew Waters has gone from high school dropout to PhD all in the name of music. Starting out as a working electric bass player as a teenager, he switched to upright in order to enroll in the prestigious Eastman School of Music.

He later received his doctorate in Jazz and Contemporary Performance from NYU, but instead of going on the road as a touring bass player or working long hours in the studio, he took a left turn into the record label world, first as head of studio operations for Capitol Records, then Vice-President of Archives for Universal Music Group, after stints as a dean at both ex’pression College and Art Institute of Hollywood.

Drew is now VP of Veva Sound, a company that specializing in music metadata that helped to create the DDEX metadata standard now used by the industry.

During the interview we talked about the differences between upright and electric bass that you might not know, the importance of metadata when it comes to credits and getting paid, music producer’s delivery requirements to labels these days, and Veva Sound’s role in helping both labels and producers. 

On the intro I'll look at the artist payouts from Sony Music's sale of Spotify stock, and upcoming changes to the vinyl record standard by the RIAA, the first since 1978. Could HD Vinyl be in the future?