A Punctuated Name Will Cost You

P!nk. Ke$ha. Hootie & the Blowfish (don't forget the ampersand, thank you very much). William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White are rolling - or is that rock 'n rolling - in their graves with all the weird capitalization and punctuation marks.
Well, one man is trying to bring order to all that chaos. Meet Bill Wilson, the music industry's digital grammarian, who has released a new rule book for spelling, grammar, and description for music.
Why does all this matter? Hannah Karp of the Wall Street Journal explains:

As the music business has become more democratic, with artists increasingly releasing their music straight onto the Internet, the data that would-be buyers need to navigate all the music has become a free-for-all.
Now data-entry experts—once the nerds of the music universe—are calling for an end to the funny business. And they are finally being taken seriously as the struggling industry scrounges around for new sources of income. With fans unable to find the music they are searching for—or buying the wrong songs—and performers and songwriters struggling to collect royalties from misidentified tracks, the industry is probably losing revenue, these experts say. Mr. Wilson said the losses are difficult to quantify and he doesn't know anyone who has tried. But some publishers who specialize in royalty recovery claim that cleaning up metadata can boost client revenue by up to 30%.

Read the rest over at WSJ.