Hi,

This week’s newsletter is inspired by the recent TikTok announcement introducing “Songwriter” profiles. I’ve been thinking a lot about how unsung heroes (non forward facing role players contributing to the success of an artist) can get more visibility.

Let’s explore below.

Let’s dive in ⬇️

There’s a real opportunity for social media and streaming platforms to highlight and showcase the role players that contribute to the art the world receives.

The “artist” (in the traditional sense) is naturally and rightly so the center piece of social media and streaming profiles, features, and opportunities. Most features are developed to serve them and highlight their music or content.

What about the other role players who come together to help bring that art to life though?

For example…

• Songwriters

• Engineers

• Producers

• Directors

• Editors

• Etc

In recent years, some outlets have made an effort to pay homage to these team members and give them their credit.

For example, Spotify has notoriously introduced credits for “performer”, “writer”, and “producer” among others in the song credits metadata. It’s a way for those involved to receive their credit in a public, forward facing way.

TikTok just introduced “Songwriter” profiles to help increase visibility for songwriters and pay homage to their work.

Other platforms have taken the liberty of actually producing content to highlight some of these role players behind the scenes - for example, Splice and their producer series cooking up beats:

Mass Appeal has their Rhythm Roulette series highlighting producers:

Native Instruments highlights engineers and producers, with a standout interview a few years ago with Drake’s engineer + producer “40”.

While these opportunities are great, what if the platforms themselves introduced features or products to help accomplish the same thing?

For example:

1) YouTube

YouTube is the epicenter of where artist content lives - music videos, lyric videos, etc yet there’s almost no place to credit the people behind it, especially directors.

Besides including in the description of a video or in the video itself, it’s almost impossible to know who the director is.

What if YouTube introduced director channels, the same way artist have their own channels? When uploading a video, artists and their teams could have the ability to tag the director’s channel which would then appear on the front facing video on the artist channel.

Fans could click the director’s name (maybe it’s highlighted underneath of the video?) and be brought to the director’s channel which could aggregate all of the videos and content that tag them.

In theory, director’s could do this now but the channel formatting itself wouldn’t be tailored to them - it’d be awesome to create a unique channel format just for directors. Directors could also use this as a portfolio of sorts when sharing their work - sharing a YouTube link as their portfolio would also help promote YouTube.

Maybe the director’s channel could also have functionality to highlight editors, producers, and those who worked on specific projects with them.

2) Instagram

Instagram is such a home for creatives to share their work yet the actual process of finding those credited isn’t easy - they either have to be mentioned in the caption or tagged in the post itself (if not in the actual content).

One of the challenges is that when a profile gets tagged, it’s still ambiguous - it’s not clear who the profile is or what their role was.

What if Instagram operated similiar to the YouTube idea above and when uploading content, artists could tag specific people with credits or metadata that appear on videos.

For example, if an artist posts a snippet of a music video, they could have the ability to tag the profiles of the director, editor, producer, etc and those profiles would show up categorized on the video tags. For example:

• Directed by: @handle

• Edited by: @handle

• Produced by: @handle

Almost like the song credits of a song on Spotify with the credits clickable to that respective profile.

Fans could then know exactly who each role player is and have an easy way of going to their profile.

It would also be cool to introduce a “portfolio” section to these creative profiles where they could tag and pin specific projects they worked on their Instagram - almost like folders that live forever.

For example, if you listed your profile as a “Director” account, you could have the option to introduce a new section to your profile next to Reels that categorizes the projects that you’ve worked on.

In my opinion, YouTube has the biggest opportunity to highlight these creators and associate team members because their platform is one of the epicenters of where content lives.

It also speaks to a bigger opportunity the platform has that I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters…what if you could actually edit content within YouTube?

YouTube currently offers limited editing functionality but what if it acquired a program like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere and allowed you to edit, upload, and publish within the same platform while displaying credits for everyone involved? It could potentially become a full A-Z ecosystem for content creation.

Some of these ideas might be a bit of a reach since so many features are designed to help artists but these could be fascinating to implement in the future.

Hopefully this was helpful on your journey.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

_{The Vault}

1) The Artist Marketing Playbook - I teamed up with my good friend and fellow music marketing expert Drew De Leon to present The Artist Marketing Playbook. An in-depth look at what an artist can do to set themselves up for success in 2025. More info HERE.