Hi!
We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about how album art and song information work with the SoCast Platform, so I’ll do my best to go over it below.
We get our album art from Apple Music, which is the safest way to prevent copyright infringements. We take the song title and artist name automatically from your datacasting provider (e.g. Tre, Arctic Palm, etc.) and search Apple Music’s library for the album art. Unfortunately, Apple’s search tool is not always accurate and thus prone to errors. We try to improve results by automatically fixing the song title and artist names, such as removing “featuring” artists or extra punctuations but we are not able to guarantee results. If the song title or artist name is not exactly the same every time, an image may appear one day, but not the next.
The Apple Music album art search tool is prone to the following scenarios:
- Songs that have featured artists (e.g. DJ Khaled ft. Drake). Removing the featured artist might improve results.
- New songs/indie artists that are not on Apple Music yet.
- Songs with similar/the same names. (e.g. Van Halen – Jump, and Pointer Sisters – Jump)
- Christian/Gospel programming because it isn’t always available in Apple Music
- Songs that are on compilation albums/greatest hits albums
- Covers of songs
If no image is returned with the song, the playlist will either display no image, or will display our generic wavelength image.
You can request to have album art manually updated by us. When you send in a request we update it for that song, for all our clients (not just your station).
To request a manual update, we’ll need the following:
- Exact song title
- Exact artist name including features (e.g DJ Khaled ft. Drake)
- Link to the iTunes album art you want us to use.
For a list of datacasting providers we work with visit: https://socastsrm.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FAQ/pages/18448408/On+Air+Playlist
Just so you’re aware, we’re also working on numerous enhancements related to album art and song history, and hope to have further updates on these later this year.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to the Client Success team via our live chat feature or the support desk: support@socastdigital.com
Thanks!
Kat & The SoCast Team
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