The artists tag is a by-product of the streaming era whereby in order to try and get as much money as possible, artists needed to elevate their prominence and so the artists tag was born, an easy way for streaming service to cash in on users searching for featured artists.

Of course the artists tacitly agreed to this, as this meant they could get more money and more exposure, even though services like Spotify should’ve been indexing features anyway.

Ultimately, this is aimed at eroding the position of artists in the music industry and in particular in hip-hop and rap where the artists generally collaborate more than in any other genre of music, because in order to try and get a fair payday, you have to undermine the actual work of the primary artist.

Put it like this, you wouldn’t see a film advertised as a Scorsese and DiCaprio film. It’s always a Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and for good reason. But in music, they diminish the role of the primary artist as much as possible in order to ensure that things stay the same and the streaming services and labels get the lion’s share of the revenue.

Even the fact that the composer tag exists rather than the producer tag shows how skewed things are and how little respect hip-hop garners, despite generating so much culturally and economically.

To go back to the film analogy, the artists tag is essentially a cast tag and I won’t deny it has its place, but the director, producer, writer far outside the role of someone who is just making a cameo and thus they shouldn’t be on the poster outside of a gimmick.