YouTube Music

YouTube Music begins rolling out song and album credits

Damien Wilde | Mar 16 2023 - 4:32 am PT

YouTube Music is now adding a long overdue function with the ability to check song and album credits when listening to your favorite music.

The function has long since been a feature of many other streaming services such as Tidal, where you can quickly see detailed song information, such as who the performer is and who wrote, produced, and composed each track.

Tidal even offers sound and mixing engineer information with appropriate credit given to backing bands, music samples, and even studio personnel where available. The streaming service also includes reviews and critics’ awards within an “Info” panel if the track or album has received those too. However, somewhat disappointingly the way that song credits are displayed on YouTube Music differs quite drastically from services like Tidal with far fewer data points.

A post from /u/matteventu on the /r/YouTubeMusic subreddit shows that some are already starting to see a “View song credits” option when accessing the overflow menu on YouTube Music. YouTube shows data about your music such as who the song is “Performed by,” “Written by,” “Produced by,” and where the music metadata was sourced. This last data point could prove troublesome if independent and self-published artists use YouTube Music, and it’s unclear how data can be submitted or if it is provided by music labels.

It doesn’t appear to have been widely rolled out at this stage. This leads us to believe that, as with many YouTube Music functions, song credits will roll out via a server-side update in the coming days and weeks. Given that this has been a requested feature on the YouTube Support Forums for almost four years, it’s about time that credit was given to the people behind the music.