Our first ever roundtable.

Happy 2023! We’ve had a lot happening at Verifi Media already this year, including many new clients in various stages of trials and work with our platform.

Verifi also had an exciting week last week when we hosted our very first metadata roundtable at the Paris HQ of Verifi Rights Data Alliance (VRDA) member Deezer, followed the next day by our annual meeting of VRDA members. The roundtable had wide representation across the digital music supply chain, ranging from large PRO/CMOs to streaming services to labels and publishers, all offering important insights into how to make reporting and collaboration in the supply chain more efficient.

We kicked off the afternoon with a presentation from Chris Cooke from CMU, who discussed the move from traditional streaming to other forms of content and monetization, such as short-form original content, AI-generated music, and NFTs. He gave as an example an omegle.com video chat which incorporated music and showed the many different ways in which it can be reworked and distributed, as well as the licensing challenges associated with this type of dynamic creation.

Next, we moved to an open forum where participants were able to share information about their challenges with data in their sectors. For example, labels pointed to the challenges posed by lack of access to publishing data, despite their responsibility to provide it to digital services. DSPs noted the lack of contact information in addition to missing publishing data, as well as the many issues arising from the regular changes to information due to catalogue movement (purchase of copyrights, reversions, etc).

One point was clear across all players: the need to accurately match recordings to works and works to recordings, with new release information being a particular challenge. All parties also noted their desire to have a single fix, rather than a multitude of disparate options, which would only maintain the current, dysfunctional siloed data system.

Participants recognized other challenges as well: (i) the need to agree on data standards, even just for fields in DDEX, (ii) the need to classify works and recordings into trees and hierarchies for derivative works, (iii) multiple ISWCs often existing for a single song, and (iv) the desire by some players to keep information private, even from the artist or writer to whom it is associated, leading in some cases to use of privacy regulations to force disclosure.

Many participants agreed with creating a timeline to change processes at least on a go-forward basis. While this may help, however, future works will often be derivatives of prior works, and this will drive the need to address the backwards-facing data as well.

Participants then divided into breakout groups to reflect on questions like: If you could start again, how would you build the backend for the digital music industry? What might a perfect supply chain look like? What key move could the industry make within the next six months to improve efficiencies? How do we scale the data infrastructure for all of the new uses we’ve already discussed today?

One participant group felt strongly that societies and rights administrators should not be competing on data, but rather on services provided to their clients. Others suggested comparing ISRCs across PROs, or called on digital services to refuse to distribute without a minimum level of data.

The day closed with a presentation from Verifi’s CEO, Ken Umezaki, on how data sharing has worked in other industries to create more robust, stable, and efficient markets, and an update on progress of work in the VRDA.

At Verifi, we are focused on providing a shared data surface for all parties in the music industry to collaborate on ownership metadata, and subscribe to changes. Our system can assign a proprietary score to data pieces, allowing participants in our system to have insight into its reliability. Our goal is to offer all parties in the music industry a reasonable single source for music metadata, answering the question: “who controls the rights to this song?” We operate in an agnostic format, accepting and delivering in many different data formats, and welcome all parties to join us on this journey. After all, data collaboration is only improved by having more and more parties participate.

Thanks again to everyone who attended last week for your participation, and especially to our gracious hosts at Deezer. We look forward to seeing you all again soon at our next one and sharing more updates soon!

Team Verifi