Data Sharing is Data Caring
Why you’re probably not being paid what you should be
By: Phil Haymes
It’s a new world and times are changing faster than ever before.

As we step further into this new millennium, our reliance on data grows exponentially. We truly are entering the “Data-Age” and we see exponential growth in the amount of data that the human race creates. It’s actually quite staggering when you think about it, the size of our digital data across the planet doubles every two years. That means, in 2019 there will be double the total amount of data than currently exists across the whole world today. DOUBLE. That’s everything created and stored between forever in the past up until 2017 — all the data we have now in existence will be created in volume again within 2 years.
So data is changing the way we do business, socialize and get noticed (#’s anyone?). It’s also changing the way we think about storing and sharing data in meaningful ways. Just 10 years ago we started hearing talk about these cloud things and now they are a part of everyday life and this year 66% of data projects involve migration to cloud platforms. Probably most of the data you see these days exists in some sort of cloud storage somewhere, distributed all over the place rather than being stored on a single local server or computer.
Those hash-tags are very interesting though, not only are they appearing all over social platforms to categorize things that Cats or Politicians do, more importantly they’re categorizing the Internet in a search-able way that we can analyze data trends with.

The nice thing is that on the Internet in general, data is becoming more search-able and structured in many ways and this is a good thing. We can go to any search engine like google or bing and type in #catmemes and get very good data back from all over the world. You can very quickly sort and find the very highest quality cat-joke crossovers the world has to offer. This is a very good example of “Data Sharing is Data Caring”.
Data Sharing is Data Caring?
What do I mean by data sharing is data caring? I think there are two kinds of data in the world. “Personal secret stuff”, and “Public useful stuff”. The Internet has become a wealth of data thanks to people sharing lots of “public useful stuff” data types. The more of that becomes available, the more valuable and useful the Internet becomes to everyone — the whole Internet ecosystem benefits.
Conversely, sharing more of the personal secret stuff, whilst interesting to some people overall diminishes the Internet ecosystem as a whole and frankly makes the whole thing a bit scary.
So in my mind, “Data Sharing is Data Caring” is about getting the right balance of sharing as much data as possible without the data being a detracting factor to something else — or in other words supplying data that improves the overall value of an ecosystem.
Data and the Music Industry
Ok, now that I’ve got that lengthy analogy of public Internet data out of the way let’s get down to real business and talk about data sharing and the Music Industry.
It’s important to note that the Music Industry like any other is an ecosystem and regardless of the different players involved there is an inter-reliance industry-wide for anyone to be successful:
- Music consumption services, whether digital or physical retail, or even concert venues or TV and Radio shows will always rely on a product for consumers to consume. So they need the creators to create product, labels to supply it, publishers to publish it and customers to consume it.=
- Labels need artists to record product that they can package either physically or digitally so that they can send to consumption services to sell.
- Artists need venues to play music, labels to package it and services to sell it so consumers can buy it. They also need publishing and writers to provide works or offer publishing services on their works.
- Licensing and rights entities need writers and artists to supply the music and licensees to pay for the music. Of course then the artists and writers need the licensing entities to pay them for their royalties.
I could keep going, but you get the idea — It’s a virtuous circle. The reality is that it’s an industry that is ALL ABOUT THE SONG. Everything else surrounding that is to ensure that the song gets created and that the song can make money for all involved.
Why You’re Probably not Being Paid What you Should Be
Within the Music industry, data is all too often treated like IP and held in internal silos in each company at various layers of the industry, and can be very hard to obtain. Whether it’s information about composition, licensing, usage or production — trying to get the right data to make sure the right person is paid for work they did is very tough even in some cases where the information that is publicly available because the data isn’t linked. For example, ISWC’s (International Standard Musical Work Code) are available and so are ISRC’s (International Standard Recording Code) BUT there’s no link between them so if you’re a streaming service you may have information about the sound recording (ISRC) but not about the writers and publishers (ISWC). In that situation you can’t easily pay the writer/publisher because you don’t know who they are. In other scenario’s you could be trying to do administration or get clearances, any number of things, but if you don’t have up to date authoritative information the chances of accuracy go down dramatically leading to situations like address changes for the payee so not knowing how to pay them. The list of issues goes on and on.
We sat down with a group of writers and publishers this week in Nashville and we were both shocked. We were shocked that they’d never heard of an ISWC and were doing their own administration. They were shocked at the existence of an ISWC and that no-one had told them yet. The realization kicked in very quickly as to why their streaming pay was non-existent; they didn’t know to supply anyone with ISWC’s telling the potential payer who they were. This is just one example of a small group of around 30 people, but imagine this expanded out globally. On the flip side, the streaming services are being sued for not paying when they likely don’t know who to pay because whilst they may have an ISRC to pay for the sound recording, they probably are lacking in ISWC’s to know who to pay for the composition.
The Solution
The problem of data sharing and integrity is already understood and under review in many countries — indeed for many years now the Copyright Office in the USA has put forward recommendations for the creation of a GMRO (General Multiple Rights Organization) that would sit in-between other agencies such as PROs and MROs to become an authoritative source of copyright data for the Music Industry as a whole, reconciling conflicting data between different sources and filling in data gaps where possible. https://www.copyright.gov/policy/musiclicensingstudy/executive-summary.pdf (pages 9–11)
It’s not always the case that the information isn’t shared and of course some information really shouldn’t be — this is why we have data security laws, standards and rules to stop sensitive data from getting out into the wild world or to make sure that only those who need to see it can.
But with that being said, the whole ecosystem can benefit from having more useful data shared — in the same way that more people taking more hash-tagged photo’s of cats and posting on the Internet can have a truly worldwide positive effect on people’s joy, sharing more structured and searchable data publicly will help raise the overall ecosystem of the Music Industry reducing administration, increasing accuracy and as a result be able to fix pay issues.
Our Mission
This is at the heart of what Jammber is about and we call it “the shortest distance between art and commerce”. In order for the industry to drive transformative change and adapt to new technology and trends, I firmly believe that we should be better at sharing the data that makes sense to help lift everyone up. Everything that could be available without causing detriment should be available and everyone would benefit from it. More accurate structured data that’s easily available would mean less administration, faster payments and lower operating costs for everyone and we’ll be working on several efforts to encourage this throughout the wider industry.

