Our fearless CEO/Co-Founder (pictured right) moments ago moderated a panel at SFMusicTech on the super sexy topic of music metadata.

While many attendees were at a Goo(Key)Note where we assume participants talked about the revolutionary idea of including links in search results, we are proud to announce that the metadata panel solved all industry problems and will be adjourning to the cocktail hour early.

Michael was joined by Rob Kaye (MusicBrainz [@musicbrainz], Founder & Lead Developer), Maureen Droney [@maureendroney] (Sr Executive Director, Producers & Engineers Wing, The Recording Academy), Ron Suarez [@DrRon] (LoudFeed, CEO & President), Stephen White (Vice President, Product and Content Management at Gracenote). This marked the first time MusicBrainz and Gracenote shared the same stage.

Twelve years ago pundits like Mark Hardie, Eric Scheirer and Jim Griffin were predicting a commercial boom in digital music. While digital music in 2009 is an everyday object in the lives of regular consumers, it has taken much longer to get here than predicted and there are still many open issues behind the monetization of digital content. One of the major stumbling blocks has been lack of standardized and open content metadata. Lack of standardization has created massive headaches and overhead expense for royalty tracking, license compliance and feature development. The panel exposed the metadata mishap in all its ugly misspelled, mismatched and proprietary glory.

The first 20 minutes of the panel featured an overview of the problem. Interestingly, there was more agreement than disagreement amongst the panelists. Everyone agreed that the creation of a universal, unique ID system for music content was essential. Furthermore, the panel was united in its belief that while government (US or other) could provide the prodding to get the industry to cooperate, solutions must come from the industry participants themselves and not imposed by a government agency (c.f. the webcasting recordkeeping debacle).

Interestingly, we learned that while MusicBrainz and Gracenote have similar solutions and different philosophies, they both favor a solution where proprietary and opensource metadata databases can coexist.

The panel ended promptly at 2pm with all metadata problems solved—except MediaUnbound’s proposal to officially exclude John Mayer from all metadata repositories was tabled for further study.