Verifi Rights Data Alliance Explained

At Verifi Media, we recently announced the launch of the Verifi Rights Data Alliance (“VRDA”) with global music companies Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell, FUGA, Unison Rights and Deezer. Together these inaugural members have committed to using Verifi’s services to enhance, collaborate and share music rights data to improve each of the company’s businesses.

We believe it is the very first time global enterprise companies representing the entire value chain of the recorded music business have concretely committed to a communal data sharing framework that benefits all companies.

At Verifi, we are extraordinarily excited about this development. We think this is a big deal for the recorded music business and creators, and wanted to dive in a bit more detail on the “what, how and why” of the VRDA:

Q: What is the VRDA?

A: The VRDA is a series of modern shared data services for the entire value chain of recorded music.

Music rights are inherently multi-party since there are two copyrights in every recording, and often multiple collaborators on each song and recording. Global parties ranging from creators, labels, publishers, CMO/PROs, administrators to financial investors all share the ownership or representation of a music asset. The music business also continues to become more global, and more collaborative. And with catalogs changing hands more frequently than ever before, businesses need not just a rights registry database, but a dynamic data engine that incorporates comprehensive change management and communication of changes to the community.

Shared data has already proven its immense value in industries such as financial services and healthcare. Banks and traders, while competitive, have benefited greatly from industry initiatives which allow them to share data in order to process transactions more efficiently. Meanwhile, doctors and patients benefit from data shared around patient outcomes. If the music industry wants to continue its exponential growth, our data backbone needs to become significantly more efficient enabling us to move away from spreadsheets and paper processes. In order to solve the data dilemma which magnifies frictions in our marketplace, we need a systematic, cross-vertical approach to answering the question “who owns the rights to this song today?”

The data dilemma facing the recorded music business continues to amplify as the industry grows and the digital economy continues to become a more distributed market. Rapidly increasing data complexity, magnifying frictions in the “best practices” at many music companies, in a rapidly growing business is the reality of what we collectively face today:

Verifi was founded on the belief that answering this question with modern technology and business buy-in is the key to enabling innovation, increased revenues, operational efficiencies, and data transparency that will support a much more robust creator economy.

Fortunately this perhaps idealistic vision is on its way to fruition. Warner Music Group (label), Warner Chappell (publisher), Unison Rights (CMO), FUGA (distributor) and Deezer (streaming service) have all committed to using Verifi’s services. Each company independently benefits from our patented shared data registry services, while simultaneously providing a much better aggregated understanding of rights, owners and changes to music data over time. Various attempts (such as the Global Repertoire Database (GRD), the Open Music Initiative (OMI), etc.) have attempted over the years to create a more collaborative data culture across the business, but most have not been able to get enough buy-in from enterprise level companies to fulfill that vision.

Our VRDA is a great start to making this a concrete reality: real companies, real data, real technology, real commitment across the value chain of recorded music, for the first time.

Q: How does this all work?

A: “Separate, but together”

We have worked for numerous years with our clients to create the right set of tools and services to systematically manage media rights data needs. In essence, we have found that there are 6 definitive elements of making a shared data engine work well for rights data in media:

1. Connect disparate data sets: We create a systematic way to connect recordings and works data, along with their corresponding creators and owners. In the case of recorded music, we provide a data translation layer (“ETL” in tech speak) to allow for those connections to be made, which involves decomposing disparate data standards, such as DDEX, CWR etc. We also provide a data services layer in our service, which uses robust algorithms to match and identify discrepancies across data provided by multiple parties. One simple output of this is a much more robust ISWC<>ISRC matched data set that improves over time.
2. Shared data portal: We provide a data sharing surface that allows multiple parties to collaborate on a composite representation (or “best known truth”) of rights and metadata, in a world where various interested parties have only a partial understanding of the complete picture of rights ownership.
3. Change management: Knowing there’s a “life-cycle” to both a music asset and creator careers, our service is inherently built around the notion of managing changes over time, and making the changes to music assets (e.g. change in ownership due to a sale of a catalog) and the various parties’ interest in music assets to be tracked (e.g. songwriter signs a publishing deal). One use of blockchain technology in our service is to create a record these changes, with a historical “audit trail” of how things got to where they are.
4. Move the data at the “speed of digital”: Verifi is not “just another database.” We built our data services with the belief that the data should “go places”; and quickly; to align with the speed in which digital media is created and consumed. We enable the communication and sharing of that ever changing data to the community in a machine literate way. We have created direct API connections to some of our clients internal data systems, a public searchable database site, where a subset of our dataset is available to anyone, and are working on an ability to subscribe to the feed via API. We also allow our clients to extract the data in standard formats such as DDEX and CWR. This setup provides a way to communicate the rights data set to the appropriate organizations, in a manner fit for the data needs of the digital media business.
5. Assessing data quality: It is critical to evaluate on an ongoing basis the quality, completeness and reputation of the data source in such a way that individual clients can make decisions around if and how to use the data from our service. Our patent pending proprietary data scoring algorithm provides a set of scores for both the data and the sources of the data. This allows our users to establish rules around which data to take in automatically versus intervene. It also allows users to hone in on which data is most relevant to improve, or fix, given the importance of any song in a catalog. It’s a bit of a crude analogy, but we sometimes refer to our scoring algorithm as the “FICO score” for music rights. A dynamic score that allows better decisions to happen more quickly.
6. Data control and integrity: Individual participants’ data integrity must be addressed. Proprietary data owned by individual businesses must have a balance with what is communicated and shared with the others. At Verifi, clients individually benefit from a structured communal data engine, while maintaining control of their data. Our technology architecture has layers of control built into our stack:

• Private Verifi Repository: Each client (or aggregator of client data, like FUGA), has its unique data repository that allows for the permissioning of their data to be shared to either specific parties and into Verifi’s composite dataset, or permission the data to the public database . This private repository is not shared, but allows their data to benefit from our proprietary data schema, built to connect and collaborate across asset types (composition vs recordings, for instance) and establishes the ability for them to access the better data set derived from the community and our data engine.
• The Verifi Composite: The data a client choses to share with others in our data service is then aggregated across parties to create the Verifi composite dataset. This dataset is still “private” in the sense that it is only accessible to the shared data community (e.g. the VRDA companies). This is where, for example, a publisher or PRO/CMO will get access to the ISRC’s related to a composition they partially control, or where a streaming service can get a feed of publishing information. It is also where data that is typically not publicly available (such as songwriting splits, territory representation) can be collaboratively improved across parties who have an interest in the music asset.
• Verifi Public Database: We provide the general public with a searchable database which connects works, recordings and product metadata together, which will improve over time as people collaborate. We sometimes refer to this as the “yellow pages” of music rights data. (You can see how we surface that linked data by looking at “Queen of The Night” by Anya Marina, for example). The goal is to allow for more people to identify the comprehensive rights holders of a particular music asset, which can lead to much more efficient licensing clearance, as well as to provide a “best known truth” to allow for people to proactively improve and complete the data sets on an ongoing basis.

This is why we call our solution “separate, but together.” This is not sharing data for sharing data’s sake: it is sharing data with other parties, in a controlled manner, that allows the benefits (more revenues, faster royalty collections, operational efficiencies, opening new revenue sources, etc.) to accrue to each client that uses Verifi for their unique business needs.

Q: Why should we care?

A: Shared data leads to better business which leads to a better creator economy.

We believe that for inherently multiparty data to be accurate and useful, the data needs to be collaborated upon across the authoritative owners and representatives of that data. In simple terms, this enables organizations to make better business decisions, leading to greater revenues, more efficiency, and data transparency, strengthening the creator economy that the digital media businesses have enabled. But don’t take our word for it, our VRDA clients believe this as well, and is why they’ve entrusted us with their data:

We are committed to being great caretakers of our clients’ data, while steadfast in the belief that significant rights data improvement has massive economic value collectively for the music business globally, and, as importantly, each organization and creator that joins will benefit from greater mobility and transparency of rights data.

This allows the many aspects of the continually evolving digital media worlds that are both exciting and often painful (e.g. global royalty collection and distribution, catalog transfers, sync licensing clearance, metaverse music use cases, etc.) to be streamlined. There is no question we have a long way to go to truly make a sophisticated rights sharing service to work at scale for the larger creator economy, but we feel we are well on our way. We hope you feel the same. And with the help and insight of our clients and partners we will continue our work to increase data literacy across all parts of the recorded music business.

If you would like more information regarding Verifi Media, or the VRDA, please reach out to us at allen@verifi.media. Learn more about Verifi Media at our website.