Challenges with Data in the Music Ecosystem

In January, QwantumRights Solutions Corp. (QRS) sponsored a panel at the Music Ally Connect event in London. Together with colleagues from SACEM, Music Reports, and Warner Chappell, we exchanged views on “How can publishers use data more wisely?”.

The discussion focussed on publishers, but the data ecosystem includes many other interdependent players, such as creators, record companies, aggregators, and users of music that report usage. The exchanges between these players often result in the inadvertent creation and use of bad data.

Bad data will propagate unless the source, i.e., the creators and often their publishers, is proactive about how their data are represented. Relations between rightsholders (e.g., publisher and sub-publisher agreements with Collective Management Organizations – “CMOs”) underpin the system but often create problems. Too often, rightsholders poorly monitor or update their data, resulting in the loss of the connection to the original song, which is what CMOs need to properly license all works and distribute all money owed to rightsholders.

Everybody knows that music data remains problematic, but the level of errors in the international documentation is higher than most people think. QRS knows this from direct experience: every time we conduct data audits, we find surprisingly high levels of data anomalies that clearly impact the flow of royalties to the rightful owners.

Many work registrations have incorrect publisher or writer information, including cases where that information is missing! It affects even high value works, not just music with no real commercial traction.

The international landscape remains complicated, layered and not fully standardized. If we started from scratch, we would definitely not build the landscape we have now.

While this landscape remained manageable in the relatively small and local-centric music universe of the 20th century, it is bursting at the seams today. Nevertheless,  this situation is neither going to go away or be magically transformed. A perfectly defendable attempt at creating a “fix”, the Global Repertoire Database, failed spectacularly in the mid-2010s.  

The unfortunate reality is that publishers and CMOs think they speak the same language when it comes to data management, but they don’t. For example, many publishers think they can rely on CMOs to clean up data. Typically, they do not. In fact, they do not even review any such data unless they are notified there is a problem, or they receive data updates that have conflicting information.

The way publishers follow up with CMOs to ensure their data remains accurate (and if not, to clean them up) is of paramount importance. It can be a time-consuming task, and it is easy to fall into a laissez-faire attitude. But if one waits until significant revenue shortfalls begin to appear before making enquiries – by then the losses have already piled up and may be impossible to recover.

Limiting data management efforts to the low-hanging fruit – the most valuable song titles - may seem to make sense from a cost/benefits perspective, but data anomalies in less valuable works can also accumulate over time and represent significant losses for rightsholders as well as increase the level of data pollution in the systems.

At QRS we strongly believe that rightsholders need to be more proactive if they are serious about collecting everything they are owed.

There are infinitely more data points today - everything is now global, must run quicker, and the financial stakes have never been higher. The music business has witnessed increased catalogue sales beyond traditional publishers that now includes investors. To maximize their return on investment, these new rights owners need to pay more attention to the data integrity of their repertoires around the world.

To really police their data in today’s complex ecosystem, all players, established or new, big or small, should use the assistance of specialized knowledge and up-to-date tools.

QwantumRights Solutions combines state-of-the-art, configurable, and complete back-office tools plus experience-based consulting services to enable our clients to tame these problems, discipline their data and then leverage it to collect and distribute more money to their rightsholders.