The Big Three record label, and specifically its Universal Music Group for Brands (UMGB) partnerships division, just recently announced the rollout of UMusic Media Network. This public launch arrives on the heels of a year-long beta, which execs say saw advertiser “content achieve millions of views from music fans globally, alongside artist content.”
Source: Universal Music Group Launches UMusic Media Network Following Beta
For a long time, every Collective Management Organisation (‘CMO’) having their own set of systems and databases was the norm. It was as if being totally self-sufficient was a badge of honour, rather than the result of a properly considered assessment of the economics and risks. To any rational observer, we have lagged behind other industries in identifying opportunities to collaborate and share back-end infrastructure, but things have been changing in recent years.
Source: ‘We have lagged behind other industries in identifying opportunities to collaborate.’
People who binge a series tend to move onto the next show within a few weeks. Specifically, 71% of these types of searches happen within three weeks of a series premiere, compared with 43% of episodic searches and 56% of hybrid searches within the same time period.
Source: To Binge or Not to Binge; Can Data Answer the Question?
The ‘black box’ of music streaming is undeniably the biggest problem affecting the global music industry today, as royalty payments to the tune of roughly £500million each year fail to reach the correct creditors. The root cause of the issue is data mismanagement and, with 60,000 tracks added to DSPs such as Spotify each day, the black hole will only continue to grow unless the proper tools and education are made available to the next generation of music creators.
Source: How royalty payment data impacts creators on a personal level (Guest column) – Music Ally
The 2022 report highlights the Confederation’s diverse services including lobbying, development of best practices, technology, and the systems to support data exchanges, help identify works and pay royalties quickly and accurately. CISAC has reported “steady progress” for the extension of the ISWC music identifier and improvements in music data reporting. It follows a major upgrade to the system completed in 2020.
Source: CISAC reports global progress on metadata and plans wider access to ISWC music identifier
Largely unregulated, the flow of bits and bytes helped fuel the rise of transnational megacompanies like Google and Amazon and reshaped global communications, commerce, entertainment and media. Now the era of open borders for data is ending. France, Austria, South Africa and more than 50 other countries are accelerating efforts to control the digital information produced by their citizens, government agencies and corporations.
The Session platform uses standard industry identifiers in a single location and makes sending metadata downstream to rights holders and other relevant participants a more straightforward process. Session is embedded within digital audio workstations (DAWs) to capture authoritative song information and data at the point of creation.
Built by VEVA Sound, VEVA Collect compiles all creator credits and their associated audio assets to ensure fair compensation to everyone working on a recording. Using exported DDEX RIN files from VEVA Collect with user-stored contributor credits, SoundExchange can retrieve and store this data to create performer lineups for a given recording.
Source: VEVA Sound and SoundExchange Announce New Partnership
The persistent identifier or PID uses what’s known as the Handle System and Rosetta to give an object or an intellectual property persistent identification across a range of platforms and context, much as the ISBN “follows” the title it identifies through multiple scenarios, functions, and databases.
Source: Copyright Clearance Center Acquires Identifier Specialist Ringgold
For years, the music industry has whispered about the dangers of fraudulent streams, which boost some artists’ play counts and skew royalty payouts. This activity takes place covertly — often hidden with technical measures, such as bot networks — so it has been hard to get a sense of the scale of the problem, let alone what might be done to address it.