W
hen IMPF was setup, it primarily had one item on its agenda: the Global Repertoire Database. Yet the GRD project, which would have created a single worldwide repository for all music publishing rights information, infamously collapsed in late 2014, by which time costs had hit £8m – a bill certain PROs were not willing to foot.
“The idea has not gone away since then,” comments Pierre Mossiat, CEO at founding member Strictly Confidential. “We still need global data for a global business. The GRD probably was probably too fast and probably too expensive for CMOs. But the next step, of regional hubs [bundling together collection across numerous territories’] is very possible, before something bigger in the future.”
Since the CRB has raised the per-stream rate, it has made it harder for Pandora to survive. Scaling for Pandora was anyway a double-edged sword, always requiring higher payments to rights holders. Initially, those right holders had agreed on easier rates to allow growth and, back then, the establishment of Pandora. But Internet radio is now well developed, and the majors are not as easy going. The collective licensing agreement with SoundExchange is practical for Pandora though unpalatable, and unless Pandora can offer other services for a discount, such as the promotion of new releases, little will change.
Digital 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.
