As battles over creative freedom and artistic expression in music go, it is a curious one – but hints at a deeper problem for music payments in the streaming age.
Coldplay had cooked up a plan to have the first album where all the song titles were just emojis. It was a cute – but almost certainly quickly dated – marketing gimmick, but they claim that the main streaming services torpedoed the idea.
The band’s Chris Martin explained the issue on The Chris Moyles Show on Radio X in the UK. “We’re trying to have the first album ever with some tracks that are just called emojis, but it’s proving tricky because of all the service providers,” he said. “Some of them say, ‘We can’t do that.’ You literally have ten million songs in one box. Let us have a picture of an apple for a song or something like that. So that’s in negotiation.”
It all feels a little behind the curve when it was being claimed several years ago that emoji was the fastest-growing language in the world given how its usage has become increasingly normalised in messaging and social media posts. That said, Coldplay would never claim to be right on the cutting-edge of much.
While emojis are standardised by the Unicode Consortium and therefore, theoretically at least, universal because they work on different computer and smartphone operating systems, the problem is that many digital distributors caution against using them (or using any unusual punctuation) in song titles. They say they could cause problems when tracks are ingested into different streaming and download platforms.
Emoji titles could also cause problems when using smart speakers to play music and requesting specific songs – a major concern for those music fans who are blind, partially sighted or dyslexic and therefore rely more heavily on speech-based commands than the average listener.
There is, however, a long history of bands and singers trying to shift how song and album titles are used.
Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós called their third album (), leaving everyone confused as to what to call it.
Then there is dance-rock band !!! (who helpfully explained it is pronounced “chk chk chk”), drone rock band Sunn O))) (which is pronounced simply as “Sun”) and electronic act +/- (pronounced “plus/minus).
It is not merely confined to the indie margins as four of Ed Sheeran’s albums have been named after mathematical symbols.
Then add into the pot late-1990s New York indie band Jonathan Fire*Eater, 1990s Irish girl group B*Witched and early 2000s indie band Stellastarr*, all of whom used an asterisk in their names which had the alarming consequence of making one wonder if their names were barely concealed profanities.
And, of course, during his contractual dispute with Warner Music in 1993, Prince changed his name to a logogram that melded the male and female gender symbols but gave no indication of how to actually say it out loud. As a consequence, he was variously known as Symbol, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince and TAFKAP.
Similarly, AC/DC should technically be written with a lightning bolt rather than a slash while ABBA should be written with the first ‘B’ facing backwards. Both acts have, however, accepted the impracticality of this when having their music listed on digital music services.
Yet there is a hugely important and serious point here cautioning against acts bending the typographical rules too much.
There is a very real risk that the metadata around a track (i.e. all the extra information that sits alongside the artist name and song title such as who the songwriters, publishers and record labels are, the year of release and so on) starts to run into problems or even trip over itself. Metadata is what music licensing, royalty tracking and payments depend on. Without it, everything falls apart.
Unclaimed (also known as “unmatched”) royalties are a huge problem for the music business and the issues have become exacerbated as streaming micropayments become the dominant form of income from recordings and their underlying publishing rights.
The simple fact is that no one quite knows just how much is lost or going unclaimed here. Some suggest it runs into the billions of dollars, while others say it is not quite that bad but certainly sits in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Some might regard Chris Martin losing out on royalties from a new Coldplay album as something that is not worth losing sleep over given that last year The Sunday Times pegged his “identifiable wealth” at £105 million.
Yet it all loops back to an ongoing – and growing – problem for a digital music business which really does not need any more slippage points: namely that a multitude of tiny data entry errors are costing artists hundreds (if not billions) of dollars.
If only there was an emoji that perfectly captured just how bad this all is.
