Poor Metadata, Conflicting Standards Hamper Drive for Global Music Database, Conference Told

Simplifying the licensing process also requires some action on orphan works, executives suggested. House IP Subcommittee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., urged the music industry to “do more to meet the demands of consumers” and said the Digital Millennium Copyright Act needs another “look,” but didn’t discuss congressional efforts to address orphan works (WID Oct 4 p6).

The industry is moving from a “high value, low-volume environment to the complete opposite,” said Mark Isherwood, director of Rightscom, citing the rapid growth of Spotify. He’s also secretariat at the Digital Data Exchange, a five-year-old effort by labels, rights societies and tech companies to create music data standards (WID May 5/06 p7), and facilitator for the Global Repertoire Database (GRD) Working Group, a newer PRO-led group focused on musical works alone. Jonathan Bender, chief operating officer at SoundExchange, said it has a “need for a repertoire database” because it gets so many poor-quality reports of plays: “We don’t have a particular hammer to use to ensure the data is good.” SoundExchange expected a global database would be created soon after it was formed, he said: “Trust me, I would rather do anything but clean metadata all day long,” which is why the group hires college students to do that.

"The challenges are bigger today but they're not new,” Baptiste said: “We haven’t been asleep at the wheel,” with several databases providing “fairly reliable” data for varying uses of musical works globally. The harder work is matching up sound recordings to the compositions, which is “where the high costs are” for PROs, he said: The key is to reduce the “human intervention” by developing standards for both compositions and recordings, the latter of which will be more difficult. And PROs must convince studio and label chiefs to devote more resources to accurate metadata up front, and dispel the perception of others in the value chain that “they might lose their relevance” in a more-efficient licensing system, Baptiste said.

A first-rate exchange infrastructure is useless without data, and getting the data will require all players having “skin in the game” and a voice in how groups like the GRD are run, Isherwood said. The GRD just kicked off a 20-week stakeholder engagement and “scoping” study to win over “hearts and minds” and break players such as PROs out of their “own little worlds” for standards development, he said. The GRD isn’t intended to replace separate registries but to stitch them together in a “quilt,” serving as a “lighthouse for commerce,” Griffin said. It’s especially important to have infrastructure and registries that can accommodate emerging music markets like Brazil, India, Russia, China and South Africa, he said. Walter McDonough, general counsel to the Future of Music Coalition, said that music identification was much harder than for patents and trademarks, the subject of other WIPO registries: Dr. Dre’s classic The Chronic had many songwriters, a common arrangement in rap music. Imagine “the DIY people” trying to keep track of all such information, he said.

It’s a “real piece of cake” when that information is documented up front, Baptiste said. The problem is the music industry before the digital age made a lot of money that covered the costs of cleaning up data after the fact, Isherwood said. That requires educating performers and indie labels who increasingly control masters that they have new revenue streams to take advantage of, Bender said. “The root of this problem starts in the studio” when artists don’t document who participated in any given work or record, said Fred Beteille, senior vice president of operations and technology at RightsFlow. He suggested that a popular music software program like Avid’s Pro Tools create a simple plugin to manage identification data.

"Perhaps it’s time to discuss whether registration isn’t a modern reality” that is necessary for creators to get paid, regardless of what the Berne Convention says, Griffin said, noting RIAA Chairman Cary Sherman raised the subject last year. That’s a bad idea, countered Baptiste: The modern problem is digital use generates little revenue relative to the costs of managing all the data. The industry should “think twice before adding another layer of cost” through mandatory registration. The issue isn’t requiring registration but making clear to artists they won’t get paid if they don’t register their works, Griffin said: With U.S. infringement penalties up to $150,000 per work, creators need to take responsibility for putting their works on record. Not only would mandatory registration require another look at Berne, but also orphan works, McDonough said -- and “it will come back to haunt you.” Canada took the step of creating an orphan-works revenue management system following a class-action lawsuit, and now the collecting societies handle orphan revenue -- a model for other territories, Isherwood said.

While PROs must make it easier to get a license, they can’t help every startup “jumpstart their business” with a “big break” in licensing costs, a frequent request from newcomers, Baptiste said. But the system is stacked against new entrants, at least in the U.S., Griffin said: There’s currently a dispute over whether Turntable.fm, which lets users take turns playing DJ in virtual rooms, should pay royalties through SoundExchange or be required to find every rightsholder before streaming music to users. “As an industry we have to ask how hospitable we are to those who would invest,” he said, citing conversations with venture capitalists who say they're wary of investing with music startups that require any proactive licensing.

The flubbed settlement over the Google Books project and its associated Book Rights Registry doesn’t hold lessons for the music industry, Isherwood told an audience member. The GRD project’s biggest challenge is getting stakeholders engaged, which the Google settlement failed to do, he said: People didn’t feel they had “skin in the game” with Google. That’s why the IMR project at WIPO aims to “synchronize” other registry platforms, not create one “uber-registry,” Griffin said.