Since the passage of the Music Modernization Act (MMA) into law in 2018, publishers and streaming services have focused on the creation of a functional mechanical rights licensing body. In formal comments to the Copyright Office, the National Association of Broadcasters, DiMA, and dozens of other organizations are demanding the creation of a far more comprehensive music rights database.
Source: Broadcasters, Streaming Services Want a Working Music Rights Database
Under the agreement, the MLC will receive $33.5 million in startup costs, as well as a first-year operating budget of $28.5 million, with the bill being split among the digital services — Amazon, Apple, Google, Pandora and Spotify — proportional by size, with the largest footing the larger portion of the payment.
Source: MLC, Digital Services Strike Deal to Fund Music Modernization Act-Mandated Database
As the industry enters a direct-to-consumer era, the dearth of data beyond “self-serving marketing” metrics will play a large role in the 2020 union talks. As linear television residuals decline, grasping more of the SVOD upside without losing the protections of the existing formula is do or die for the unions.
Source: Streaming TV’s Ratings “Black Box” Could Lead to Hollywood Guild War
Source: Silicon Valley’s Congresswomen Want a New Tech Regulator
PRS for Music is the latest company to join the analytics bonanza with the launch yesterday (5 November) of a bespoke royalty dashboard for writers, their managers and publishers. It is available to all PRS members through their online account profile, and covers streams, downloads, broadcast, live and business usage of their works.
Source: PRS for Music launches a data dashboard for songwriters – Music Ally
VEVA Live focuses on real-time turnaround. All of the hi-res audio and metadata captured from the night is immediately accessible via VEVA’s platform, Asset Connect. Working directly with the FOH engineer, VEVA is able to connect the entire artist team — ranging from management, their label, marketing, and social media teams — to quickly access the material and decide how to exploit it.
Source: Touring Artists Are Sitting on a Goldmine of Live Recordings — Veva Live Is Doing Something About It
Perhaps the biggest cause of missed revenue and undetected rights conflicts is poor matching. When an ISWC is present (and correct) the match is easy. But in our experience only about 30% of the songs in publisher databases have an ISWC. Blokur now uses our new graph-based matching, which ensures that your song registration will be matched to what other publishers are claiming for that song with or without an ISWC.
Source: Leaving Beta — Three things for music publishers to look out for in the new Blokur
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, which includes many Hollywood studios as well as the streaming giants Netflix and Amazon, plans to take on password sharing. While no concrete measures have been announced, a new working group will look into the issue and help to establish best practices to address this and other forms of unauthorized content use.
Source: Global Anti-Piracy Coalition Takes On Password Sharing – TorrentFreak
The Mechanical Licensing Collective’s healthy startup budget is meeting resistance from at least one major streaming platform. An executive at the platform — which is easily one of the top five in terms of sheer size and subscribers — indicated that the MLC’s math is being regarded as wildly expensive.
Source: Streaming Giant Balks at MLC’s $66.25 Million Startup Budget
The web-based workflow app Bounce is now available in a public version. Developed by Godmode Music co-founders Talya Elitzer and Nick Sylvester, Bounce streamlines file sharing during a record’s creation by allowing music creators and their team to organize tracks and metadata, compare different versions, securely share demos and send and receive time-stamped, threaded feedback.