My initial response has been to call attention to this and other liner note issues in my RARB reviews. But I wanted to do something more to help these artists before they head to the presses.
To that end, I just posted a very detailed article about a cappella liner notes. Any group seeking the best practices will have a free resource that's readily available to them.
I also made a plea to all the a cappella producers who frequent a producers forum on facebook, on September 30th, 2012 in which I asked them to take on this issue as well:
As many of you know, I review aca recordings for RARB. I started noticing a few years back that groups were replacing composers' credits on their albums with OPB (originally performed by). This started small and I thought little of it. But now, I'd say that more than 90% of collegiate groups have ceased crediting composers. I comment on this in every review, but that's shutting the barn door after the horses have left. The people in this group could change this.
We producers have the opportunity to alter the behavior because we as a group probably reach more than 90% of all collegiate a cappella groups BEFORE they make their final liner notes. It would cost us nothing to include this language in our contracts: "You agree to credit all composers by their complete names in your liner notes and in the any digital metadata. You understand that the original performing artist is not the same as the composer."
And for those of us that don't use contracts, we could make a point to tell the groups to credit the composers and not the original performing groups.
This doesn't make us police. We do not have to enforce penalties or blacklist clients who ignore this. But just our "universal" request could make a huge impact.
I am writing an article on acappella101.com that gives best practices for handling all album credits. But I know that combined action on our part will do much more to stem the tide of this hurtful practice.
Composers are the only people involved in the recording process that don't have a say in the matter. Artists, and by extension, producers and arrangers, get to use the fruits of their labor without asking permission. I hope you'll agree that the very least we can do is credit them in liner notes and in MP3 metadata.