Music

A Surprisingly Interesting Dive Into Classical Music Metadata 

musical scoreDigital service providers (DSPs) have copped a lot of flack for a perceived lack of support for classical music. Some of the criticism has been leveled at the methodologies used to ingest and display classical, which can vary widely from store to store. A universal standard amongst stores for organising classical music would be ideal. However, this is half the problem; for DSPs to ever display classical metadata correctly, they’ll always be reliant on a supply of consistently good metadata.

One solution is to supply classical content in a way that’s homogenous with the way the same content is managed by the digital services that invest the most in it. iTunes, in particular, has an established methodology for classical metadata, which encompasses many millions of albums and tracks. Their conventions therefore heavily influence how we should supply our metadata. Or to put it another way, do as the store demands consistently, or don’t see it on store.

Source: A Surprisingly Interesting Dive Into Classical Music Metadata – hypebot

ASCAP Payout to Industry Falls by $16m, Despite Revenue Growth

US licensing body ASCAP collected more than $1bn for the second year in a row in 2015 – but paid out some $16.1m less to songwriters and publishers.

As a result, the collection society’s overall cost-to-income ratio moved in the wrong direction for rights-holders – despite its expenses actually dropping in the year.

Total receipts at ASCAP last year hit $1.015bn, up 1.3% on the $1.002bn collected in 2014. However, 2015 saw distributions of $867.4m to ASCAP’s 560,000 members in the US and around the world.

Source: Music Business Worldwide

What a Blockchain for Music Really Means

music_splitsBlockchain technology is what enables Bitcoin to allow financial exchange without a middleman. It is effectively a decentralized database where participants follow a protocol to record the ownership of tokens of value and their exchange, without the need for a central entity like a bank to provide trust.

An imaginative person will jump to extend the metaphors of such a system to other domains, and of course to the music industry. A music blockchain would be a single place to publish all information about who made what song, without having to trust a third-party organization.

However, before contemplating such a solution, it is important to distinguish between two distinct but often conflated problems in the music industry—because one must be solved before the other.

Source: Mine Labs

Universal Wins Big Ruling in Copyright Lawsuit Over In-Flight Music

Getting record labels to sign off on licensing is tricky. That’s nothing compared to winning a case over the lack of licensing where the target is moving.

Universal Music and Capitol Records have navigated the complexities of international air travel to score a summary judgment ruling that when it gets to a jury next month to decide damages, could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The defendant in the lawsuit is IFP and parent company Global Eagle, a worldwide provider of in-flight entertainment from movies to songs.

Source: Billboard

Prince, a Master of Playing Music and Distributing It 

20160422prince-mobile-slide-igd4-jumboPrince, who was found dead on Thursday at 57, understood how technology spread ideas better than almost anyone else in popular music. And so he became something of a hacker, upending the systems that predated him and fighting mightily to pioneer new ones. Sometimes he hated technology; sometimes he loved it. But more than that, at his best Prince was technology, a musician who realized that making music was not his only responsibility, that his innovation had to extend to representation, distribution, transmission and pure system invention.

Many advances in music and technology over the last three decades — particularly in the realm of distribution — were tried early, and often first, by Prince. He released a CD-ROM in 1994, Prince Interactive, which featured unreleased music and a gamelike adventure at his Paisley Park Studios. In 1997, he made the multidisc set “Crystal Ball” available for sale online and through an 800 number (though there were fulfillment issues later). In 2001, he began a monthly online subscription service, the NPG Music Club, that lasted five years.

Source: The New York Times

‘The Music Industry Needs More Innovators and Fewer Lawyers’

Records lying on floor by 1970?s stereo systemNinety-nine percent of the data in existence was created within the past two years.

Yet, more than 99% of recorded music was created before the past two years. Recorded music was largely an analog phenomenon until the ’90s and the digital era.

The institutions that sprung up around the music – to record, distribute and monetize, even to secure copyrights and administer royalties – were all created as analog institutions, not forced to compete, or even exist, in a digital world until very recently.

The bulk of the data meant to help collect revenue for music rights holders is not ready for the digital world. Much of this metadata is incomplete. It is often in conflict with other data sources and does not form a complete picture of the recording it’s meant to describe.

Source: Music Business Worldwide

Bridging The Streaming Music ‘Value Gap’

music-onlineThe global music business offered up two cheers this week for the first signs of life in the recorded music business in nearly a decade. According to International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) latest global sales report, total recorded music revenue grew 3.2 percent in 2015, to $15.0 billion, the biggest jump since 1998 and the only growth since 2012, when sales ticked up 0.3 percent.

The overall growth came entirely from digital sources, particularly streaming revenue, which jumped 45 percent over 2014, to $2.9 billion, or 19 percent of total revenues. Physical sales continued their decade-long slide, falling another 4.5 percent, buoyed somewhat by the continued renaissance of vinyl.

The strong streaming numbers were evenly distributed, however.

Subscription streaming revenue accounted for $2 billion of the $2.9 billion total, as the total number of paying subscribers reached 68 million, while industry revenue from ad-supported streaming amounted to a mere $634 million, despite more than 900 million listeners worldwide.

Data and the DMCA

biz+-+copyrightA group of 18 music industry organizations, representing songwriters, publishers and musicians, filed comments last week with the U.S. Copyright Office in response to the office’s congressionally ordered inquiry into the operation and effectiveness of Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, otherwise known as the “safe harbor” provisions of the law.

And to make a long filing short: they don’t think it’s working very well at all.

As discussed in a previous post here, people in the copyright industries have been pining for years for a do-over of the safe harbors and notice-and-takedown procedures, which they claim have amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card for online infringement, and the music groups came prepared.

Their 70-page filing (including appendices) is chock full of colorful charts and graphs, footnoted legal arguments, and research findings, all purporting to demonstrate conclusively that the Section 512 bargain, which was intended to provide a limit on the liability of online technology providers for infringement by their uses while creating legal tools for copyright owners to get infringing content removed from the web, has been rendered null and void by advances in web technology and overly narrow interpretations of the law by the courts.

The Legality of Selling “Used” Digital Songs and Movies Headed to Appeals Court

For those who have amassed an extensive iTunes collection of songs and movies, is there any hope of reselling these works?

Back in 2011, a company called ReDigi attempted to give consumers just such a pipe dream. The idea was to take advantage of the “first sale” doctrine, which gives those who purchase copies of copyrighted work the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy notwithstanding the interests of the copyright holder. ReDigi provided cloud storage and a market for “used” songs bought off of iTunes. Naturally, the record industry wasn’t happy, which led to a lawsuit and a big ruling in April 2013.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

Apple-Dubset Deal Marks A Rights-Tech Milestone

DJ_2010Apple Music this week tapped rights-tech developer Dubset Media to manage clearances and royalty payments for DJ mixes and other mashups, opening the way for thousands of hours of user-generated content to be made available legally on the streaming service.

The deal, which relies on Dubset’s proprietary technology for identifying the individual tracks used in extended mixes and making payments to the appropriate rights owners, marks a milestone for electronic dance music (EDM) and other types of derivative work, such as DJ mixes and remixes, which have become hugely popular with music fans but until now have largely been kept off the major streaming services due to the difficulty and complexity of clearing the rights for the dozens of tracks they typically include.

Instead, most EDM and DJ mixes wound up on platforms like SoundCloud, which until recently had no licensing deals in place with music labels or publishers, or on underground streaming services that are less particular about copyrights.

“Our genre has grown hand in hand with the rapid growth of streaming and digital services yet, despite billions of online plays, most of our creators and rights-holders earn very little for their efforts compared to their ‘pop’ peers,” Association of Electronic Music CEO Mark Lawrence told Music Business Worldwide in response to the Dubset announcement. “This is the first move to correct the imbalance.”

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