July 24, 2019

As music data increases in volume, new challenges are emerging for the music rights industry. Spanish Point Technologies’ matching engine application supports organisations to overcome these issues.

#1 More opportunities for bad metadata

In a recent article, we focused on one of the biggest challenges facing music rights organisations – inaccurate metadata. You can read the article here: https://www.spanishpoint.ie/news-blog/addressing-music-metadata-issues-through-music-matching-technology/.

Metadata issues can have catastrophic effects for artists, with many losing out on much of their due royalties and fair attribution. From human error to differing metadata formats, there are many opportunities for inaccuracies. Vital to tracking royalties, music rights organisations need to identify issues quickly and match the correct works.

#2 Managing increased volume with legacy systems

The volume of music data has increased rapidly, with music rights organisations reporting large and accelerated growth in the size of their repertoires. With legacy systems, this can be very difficult and time consuming to manage. New international partnerships with other organisations and the rise in music streaming contribute to this rapid growth.

Another contributing factor to the increase in data is reduced song duration. Earlier this year, Nilay Patel of The Verge stated in the past 18 years songs have become approximately 30 seconds shorter. This, of course, will drive more revenue for the artists, but increase the number of individual royalties to processed.

With streaming continuing to dominate music distribution and more connections between organisations, the volume of data is set to increase further.

#3 Music data is becoming more complex

Music information has become more complex, and therefore so has processing and matching the data. With each song produced there is a plethora of information attached. The complexity can stem from various reasons.

Streaming allows listeners to instantly play music from across the world, in various languages. When these works feature special characters in titles and information, this can create complex data that may not be recognised within the repertoire.

Another cause of complexity is the amount of information linked to a musical work. Music production is a very collaborative process, with a song passing through various artists, producers and writers before it ever hits the distribution platforms. Following this, there may also be various versions and remixes. All of these contributors must be paid royalties in various percentages for their part in the music composition.

Processing complex data can be time consuming, create errors in systems and make it difficult to match works within the repertoire.

Overcoming the challenges:

These challenges can put a strain on resources and repertoire management. Spanish Point Technologies’ matching application can address data issues facing music rights organisations.

The high performance engine supports organisations to address metadata errors and ensure music royalties are tracked with accuracy. With music data volume continuing to grow, the robust cloud based application built in Microsoft Azure is autoscaling. This means it can accommodate rapid changes in repertoire size and incoming data. Built to manage all major sources of music data, the application is also highly configurable to account for specific needs.

To discuss integrating this high performance application and overcome data challenges, talk to our matching team!