By Pär Almqvist and Bryson Nobles
It’s time to restate the obvious: the music industry needs a global registry of verified
copyright ownership data. If a unified and shared data layer of music ownership existed,
it would unlock massive opportunities and growth for the whole music industry.
However, many now believe this can never be done – likely due to the failure of the
Global Repertoire Database in 2014. Many companies have legitimate reasons for
maintaining their own data siloes, but in our experience, it’s actually mainly because of
lack of resources, knowledge, and incentives. The time has come for us to address
these issues and move toward a solution rather than staying stuck in the past.
First, let’s take a look at where we are. According to Will Page’s latest Global Value of
Music Copyright report at Pivotal Economics, which includes both recording and
publishing income, the music business generated $45.5 billion USD in 2023. Assuming
the average industry growth rate of 9% held last year, we’re looking at nearly $50 billion
USD for the entire worldwide music industry in 2024. You know who else generates $50
billion USD in a single year? Companies like American Airlines, HP, Oracle, and Nike –
and not together, but separately. So why is music, as a global industry, making so
comparatively little when it is in everyone’s ears all the time – from the daily commute,
to the clothing store, to the café, to the nightclub, and in your favorite video games?
One of the main reasons is inaccurate and inaccessible data.
How can bad data lead to that much lost revenue opportunity? In the words of Erik
Gilbert, President of Duchamp, Inc. and Co-Owner & Director of Entertainment at
Intelligence Ltd., “Data only has value if it’s shared.” Let’s expand on that. There are a
couple of different ways music can make money, chiefly by being consumed,
performed, or licensed. If we focus on just radio performances, we know that when a
song is played on the radio, a performing rights organization (PRO) collects
performance royalties from the station. Another organization, a collective management
organization (CMO), collects neighboring rights royalties from the station in many
countries. To pay the rightful royalties to the actual copyright owners and royalty
recipients – including artists, songwriters, producers, and performers, as well as record
labels and music publishers – these collecting societies rely on registrations that spell
out who owns what. DSPs like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube also rely on them, as
do thousands of other services, both digital and analog.
The problem is that these registrations are often missing, incorrect, or in dispute.
Globally speaking, they also don’t travel well. There are roughly 300 PROs and 100
CMOs in the world. Some countries have only one while others have up to eight. Across
these organizations, there are billions of individual copyright registrations. But these
registrations are often local and don’t exist in all the countries where the music is being
consumed, performed, and licensed. Another factor is the actual nature of PROs and
CMOs. In many countries, they are not-for-profit entities owned by their members. They
are not technology companies, and they often lack the resources to invest in building
the required infrastructure for unlocking the music data opportunity.
Now let’s say a complete, verified global registry of copyright ownership data existed.
Let’s also say it provided an API for PROs and CMOs, along with the rest of the music
industry, to access it, and for the next generation to build on it and from it. We estimate
that an additional several billion dollars USD could then be paid to rightful copyright
owners every year – including your favorite artists, songwriters, producers, and
performers. This includes both a boost in correctly matched royalties and the fact that
such a database would significantly speed up the licensing process for sampling and
sync usages in movies, TV, commercials, video games, and more – leading to more
deals and more revenue. We could also meaningfully address the AI issue by providing
companies with opt-in access to music copyright ownership data, enabling them to
ethically train their models and generating significantly larger potential revenue.
The alternative, to continue the current practice of decentralized and therefore partial
pools of data with significant errors and inconsistencies, will continue holding back the
full commercial potential of music copyrights – and in extension the potential of the
global music industry.
So how do we get there? We encourage everyone that owns and manages music
copyright data to join in a collaborative spirit and begin sharing their data more freely
with others in the industry. It’s a small start, and it might take a while to get to where we
need to be, but gradual progress over time is the only way to achieve anything
worthwhile. And making music a $100 billion business sure sounds like a worthwhile
goal to us!
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