When adding credits to a hip-hop track, I faced a dilemma — should I list the creators of the beats as producers (which seems obvious), or as composers of the work, since they create the actual music?
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I usually add them as both, because they both ‘designed’ the music and made the music happen.
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I’ve expressed this same dilemma here. Based on reosarevok’s response, I’ll put the artist as composer if the artist is stated (implicit/explicitly) to have just made the beat, but otherwise I’ll directly translate the “producer” credit to the recording. Though I do wish there was a distinction between the MB definition of producer vs. what the credit typically means in modern rap.
They are usually listed as both on most releases. I usually just show how it’s listed on the release. But yeah, if it actually says “creator of beats”, I’ve never seen that, but does seem to be saying both.
I’ve been meaning to make a post on this for a while. I feel that it’s neither. I believe that when the track title says “prod. Metro Boomin” or something similar, it should be treated as a featured artist. Metro Boomin is pretty established, so I know that in many cases he is actually a producer, but for most underground SoundCloud rap the prod tag simply means they used the beat. Usually the final mixing/mastering is done by the track artist anyway. For that reason I think it should be treated the same way you would a dual artist credit, like RJD2 with Aceyalone, or The Alchemist with Domo Genesis.
Even if the artist just used the beat, the beatmaker would still be the composer and what is generally understood as producer in hip hop. Theoretically, we could have a separate relationship for hip hop producing and “normal” producing, but in reality they’d get misused all the time and in a lot of cases it would be unclear which of the two even applies (or if both do!). So we just use normal producer and shrug, basically.
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