Why? – Dec 2024
By the way, why does Music360 do what it does?
Ever wonder how your favourite musicians get paid when their songs are played on the radio, in a cafe, or even in a TV show? It seems simple, right? But behind the scenes, it’s a tangled web of outdated systems and missing information.
Think of it like this: imagine a library where the books have no titles, no authors, and are just scattered everywhere. That’s kind of what the music industry is dealing with when it comes to data and metadata.
This “mess” isn’t intentional. It’s a historical hangover. Before the digital age, music information lived on vinyl sleeves and paper records. Tracking was manual and localized. Then came the digital explosion. The internet and digital music revolutionized how music is created, distributed, and consumed. However, this rapid shift overwhelmed existing systems. Millions of songs suddenly needed digital identification and ownership information. The old systems just couldn’t keep up.
Also, the digital age empowered independent artists to create and distribute music without traditional record labels. While this democratized music creation, it also meant less organized metadata creation and management.
There are also intrinsic issues due to the structure of the music industry itself, since it involves numerous stakeholders (artists, labels, publishers, collecting societies, streaming platforms). Each developed their own databases and systems, often with different standards and formats, leading to inconsistencies and difficulties in sharing information. For a long time, there was no universally accepted standard for music metadata. This lack of standardization made it difficult to exchange information between different systems and databases.
The ways we consume music have changed drastically (streaming, downloads, public performance, VoD…). Traditional metadata systems were not designed to track these diverse uses, leading to gaps in data collection and royalty distribution.
This lack of clear, consistent information causes major problems. For instance, if a song’s details are wrong or missing, its usage will not be properly tracked. Royalties cannot be paid if no one knows who to pay. So, artists are often in the dark about where their music is used and played. And even if CMOs play a crucial role in the creative ecosystem by facilitating the legal use of copyrighted works, ensuring creators are rewarded for their efforts, and promoting a culture of respect for intellectual property, the royalties for music usage are often not distributed according to actual music usage, so there is room for improvement in the distribution process.
Music360 is about bringing the music industry into the 21st century. We’re using technology to solve these long-standing problems, ensuring that the creators behind the music we love are recognized and rewarded through a fair and transparent royalties distribution solution that promotes social justice and a more diverse and resilient music ecosystem, and enable fairer policymaking and more accurate royalty distribution through information about the real usage of background music.
Music360 