Metadata matters, probably more now than ever, and hallelujah if this works and if everyone uses its 4,500-row spreadsheet with space for time signatures and tempos and vocal registers and opus numbers and pronunciations and reviews and and and, all of which sounds awesome except maybe the rows in the spreadsheet that pertain to "focus tracks," which has nothing to do with the music or the making of the music or the sound of the music and which is one piece of information that, all things being equal, I don't want ALEXA to have in her pocket. Because then my smart speaker is just another corporate radio DJ except she doesn't get the benefit of the payola, so it's lose-lose for both her and me. When I say, "Alexa, play some BRITTANY HOWARD," I want Alexa to act as my assistant and queue up an appropriate selection of music for *me* rather than acting like an assistant at Brittany Howard's label with its own ideas of what I should hear because then I'm just doing the label's bidding and now I'm going to want some payola myself. I don't want payola, just a good, smart playlist. Maybe Alexa, left to her own devices, would start with the current focus track anyway, which is fine, but I want the choice to be hers, not the label's. If I want a corporate hard sell, I'll ask Alexa to play the radio, thank you very much. Alexa and her colleagues in the smart speaker world are the very reason that metadata standards have become urgent for an industry that had ignored them for years. Lots and lots of easily digestible and shareable metadata is needed to help those speakers do their jobs when their owners ask for "morning music" or "'90s East Coast hip-hop" or "jazz to do my taxes to." It's inevitable, of course, that that data is eventually going to get corrupted with label business priorities because that's how the world works but let's not start that way. Let's not *plan* for it. Because otherwise we appear to be going in a great direction here. Next step: Once we've standardized all the data, let's make proofreaders standard, too... Sixty merchandise/album bundles! For one seven-song EP! I don't begrudge SUPERM its place atop this week's BILLBOARD 200, which the group and its label, SM, worked hard for, but I wonder if Billboard might one day decide that streaming numbers, ironically, are a more trustworthy accounting of who's actually listening than CD sales are... Music publishers pile on TIKTOK... AMAZON has a music festival because "of course"... RIP JULIE GIBSON.