QRS Montage – A Better Way Forward

Contrary to the urban legend that collective management organizations (“CMOs”) are complacent and fighting the future, most of their boards and executive teams are committed to improvements and would like to find ways to do so while preserving their other strategic goals.

Not A New Problem

Historically, CMOs have made several attempts to join forces and develop commonly shared back-end systems. About twenty-five years ago, the International Music Joint Venture (“IMJV”) was the first such initiative, trying to build a joint operations center that would enable its shareholders (notably societies such as ASCAP, BUMA-STEMRA, and PRS) to rely on one common point of operations, thus hoping to achieve big savings. The plan fell apart after a few years for reasons that, in hindsight, should have been a warning for those who, about a decade later, supported the effort towards building a Global Repertoire Database (“GRD”). The GRD coalition, which involved music publishers, also collapsed after a few years of efforts.

Realizing economies of scale and improving data quality remain as important today as they were then – perhaps even more so. But to date, most approaches have neglected three crucial challenges in relation to governance, operational autonomy, and data integrity.

If the mutual solution is too rigid, does not preserve every partner’s data, or is dominated by one or several entities attempting to mold it around their own specific goals, some may conclude that no joint or shared service center could work very well, if at all.

The Twin Perils of Turbulence and Paralysis

Most CMOs have a dual nature. They are both a business that is looking for maximum efficiency and a cultural player that cannot sacrifice everything on the altar of cost-effectiveness – many of their rightsholder members would simply not agree. This explains why most creators and publishers want their CMO to remain independent and not become subservient, even via shared back-office services, to a larger one.

This creates tension between the well-understood wish to improve operations and cost-effectiveness via mutualized solutions, and the risk that these solutions will compromise their operational independence and lock them into subordinate situations forever.

Even between partners that are roughly equivalent in size, strategies may diverge over time. If that strategic deviation bleeds onto the tool, for example depriving it of necessary upgrades or investments, that tool may decay and become suboptimal or unreliable in very short order.

An inherent lack of trust in the long-term stability of joint service centers and the durable alignment of interests among competitors are the primary reasons for the caution with which CMOs have embraced mutualized solutions and the significant difficulties that many traditional and highly centralized service centers have been experiencing.

“One-Size-Fits-All” Approaches Have Limitations

While some convergence in business practices and rules is desirable for rights management, an increasingly globalized activity, CMOs are the product of decades of separate histories, and they do not operate in a vacuum. Countries do not have the same legislations, regulations of traditions, and their domestic CMOs cannot be expected to operate cookie-cutter operations dictated by the options taken by the leadership of a joint operations center.

Distribution rules need to remain customizable; transparency and granularity expectations vary widely, and even the basic economic parameters of the CMO require adaptation. Is it big or small? Is it in a country with a specific culture and language or not?

Sacrificing all this flexibility in return for expected economic benefits via rigid joint operation centers with one database, one team, and limited options for diverging rules and practices is therefore not very appealing.

Can The Eggs Be Unscrambled?

CMOs are like other individuals and businesses. Once they choose a service provider, they want a way back if the chosen path does not pan out.

For business and legal reasons, notably data privacy laws, they need their data to be traceable, auditable and to remain segregated. Technical solutions that intermingle data into giant databases are not only unwieldy and risky from an IT perspective but can also become traps. There are stories about CMOs that have grown dissatisfied with their mutualized service but are reluctant to get out because they are not sure that they will be in a position to successfully regain access to and transfer their up-to-date data to a new partner or to manage it themselves. A la Hotel California, trying to check out but never being able to leave is problematic…

A Better Way

With Montage, QRS brings to the marketplace a series of tools that resolve this tension.

Montage is powerful and flexible. It can serve equally well a newly established rights manager or a giant CMO that has been in business for decades.

Montage can be deployed to fit each customer’s requirements without fresh coding or IT developments because it is 100% configurable and parameter based. This enables Montage to adapt to a customers’ business rules and practices, whereas too many other solutions require the customer to change its way of doing business or rely on customizations that are not sustainable in future releases of the solution.  Montage provides configurable workflows that let a customer leverage proven and efficient processes in an automated manner.

Montage brings huge economies of scale thanks to developed processes that benefit all customers.  Established data governance practices ensure each customer’s data set remains secure, segregated, shareable between partners, immediately accessible and can be returned to the customer should they want to change solutions.  Montage can be implemented in the cloud (in the country of each customer’s choosing) or “on premises”.

Montage is an agnostic tool designed to meet today’s needs but more importantly the needs of tomorrow and our customers’ evolving vision and goals.

Finally, Montage is not just beautiful slides or vaporware.

It is fully in existence, it can be tested and taken for a spin with your data!

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