If journalists' primary source of income was a royalty generated every time a reader clicked on an article and spent at least 30 seconds looking at it, they'd be even worse off than they are now. The royalty would be about a thousandth of a penny per view. But also, more often than you'd like to think, the site wouldn't know who to pay, even if the writer's name was in bold type at the top of the article. Because metadata. It's hard. There's no universal, standardized way of communicating, through HTML, who the author of any given story is, or what the story's headline is, or just about anything else a royalty-paying platform might need to know. Or any platform that simply wants to give credit where credit's due. Spend a day putting together a newsletter like, say, this one and you'll learn that quickly. Of course, that isn't how most writers are paid—let's not give publishers any funny ideas—but it is more or less how it works for musicians, songwriters and anyone else who participates in the digital royalty flow of a song. The money's in the metadata. And despite the fact that legal music streaming has been around for nearly 20 years—as long as hip-hop had been around when JAY-Z first showed up—there's still no standardized way to use metadata to communicate who everyone is to everyone who needs to know. Which is not only why credits can be hard for a user to read, it's also how $40,000 in royalties for one musician can go missing, just like that. Each database, DANI DEAHL tells us in a thorough rundown of the current mess for the VERGE, has its own set of rules. "The fields everyone has chosen to write into their software to populate these credits are all different," entertainment lawyer JEFF BECKER tells her. This is something I learned in 2005, when I got my first job in streaming music. The metadata that labels had to send to ITUNES was different than the metadata they had to send to, say, MUSICNET, even though both platforms needed the same information. This made no sense in 2005. In 2019, or the entire length of RIHANNA's career later, it's certifiably insane. Artists, writers and producers often don't know what info to log or how it's going to be used. Heaven forbid someone makes a mistake. A variety of companies and industry groups have tried to fix this, and things are better now than they were then, but not the entire length of Rihanna's career better. I first heard the word "blockchain" as a magical solution to all of this about an hour and a half after the first MusicREDEF went out into the world four and a half years ago. Read the comments on Deahl's piece. Blockchain is still very much the magical solution. Abracadabra. Poof. I love meeting with companies like SONGTRUST and the Australian startup JAXSTA who are attacking various pieces of the problem and often doing amazing work. I'm also reminded, each time I do, how enormous the problem still is... KLAY THOMPSON is temporarily reducing his DRAKE intake ("soft" songs like "HOTLINE BLING" are out), a drastic step for a longtime Drake fan that can mean only one thing: The NBA finals begin tonight. Drake's TORONTO RAPTORS versus E-40's GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS. Allegedly, people named KAWHI and STEPH are also involved. Toronto's 4KORNERS will DJ tonight's game at SCOTIABANK ARENA... RIP RALPH MURPHY.