Solving Music Rights - the World's Biggest Jigsaw Puzzle!

Over the last couple of months ClicknClear has increased the number of tracks we have available for instant license by well over 1 million tracks, which is our biggest jump to date.

This is mainly because we recently signed deals with The Orchard, Sony’s recording distribution company, and Universal Music, the world’s biggest record label.

When we sign any rightsholder deals, we have to solve the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle to get the tracks onto (and sometimes off of) our licensing platform for choreographed sports.

Here’s what goes on behind the scenes!

First, Some Background  

If you’ve been following our blogs, you’ll know by now that there are two separate ‘sides’ to music ownership: ownership of the master recording made by a recording artist (represented by record labels), and ownership of the song that’s embodied in the recording (represented by ‘music publishers’).

Different master recordings can embody different versions of the song, whether it's a live version or a cover by a different artist, with the same songwriters owning the underlying song. The recording artist may also be involved in writing the song, in which case they are represented by a record label AND a music publisher.

Next, Some Challenges

The first challenge faced when trying to match rights to tracks is the fragmented ownership of music rights, especially in publishing. On average there are 9 writers who collaborate to write a hit song, and who each own a different percentage ‘split’ of the song - but permission is needed from all of them before you can use even a small part of the song.

Additionally, there is no particular correlation in ownership between say Warner, Sony, or Universal record labels and publishing companies - for example Sony Music Publishing doesn’t represent all of the writers on Sony Music (record label) songs, it's pretty randomly spread around.

There are so many writers represented by different companies, including very small shares of ownership which can block licensed uses, that just signing an agreement with one, or even all, major music publishers doesn’t necessarily complete the puzzle.

The ‘worst’ example we have found of this fragmentation so far is the song Sicko Mode by Travis Scott which has 30 (yes, thirty!) writers, some with shares of 0.1% or less - as shown below:

On top of this, it's not unusual for one song to be represented by different music publishers and record labels in different countries.

And there is ‘churn’ in the representation of catalogs - it can and does change over time. So the representation of any one song can change at any time, in any country.

Finally, there is the issue of scale. There are many millions of music copyrights, so when you have an agreement in place with record labels and music publishers, you need to understand what music they own, have access to the audio files, and be able to easily manage that volume of information.

We are currently dealing with around 50 million copyrights, from all of the majors plus thousands of independent record labels and music publishers.

It is therefore not practical for any organization to deal with this amount of music without a ‘big data’ technology solution - which we have developed.

And Finally, A Solution!

There is no global public database of music copyright ownership, so we have built our own to store audio and manage music rights information shared by the record labels and music publishers under the agreements we sign with them.

This information comes in the form of electronic ‘metadata’ - there are industry standard formats (DDEX for recordings, CWR for publishing) but some rightsholders use different formats. From the larger rightsholders we are getting the same feeds that music streaming services get, but as we license different rights - outside of allowing individuals to ‘listen’ to music - we have to ensure we get 100% of all rightsholders signed up on each song, before we can issue a license.

Whenever we get new metadata deliveries from any rightsholder (which happens daily), our code automatically gets to work on this ‘giant jigsaw puzzle’ of country-by-country, song-by-song music rights, matching recordings to songwriting, and identifying when we own 100% of each - no less, and no more.

• If the ownership shares for a song total less than 100% we are obviously missing a share of ownership and can’t license it - we need to identify which rightsholder(s) to reach out to.

• If the rights for any song are MORE than 100%, there is likely a problem with the metadata as the different owners seem to be claiming more ownership than is possible. When we see problems like this we investigate and look to clarify it with the rightsholders involved before making the song available for license.

In this way, we calculate the impact of each new piece of recording and publishing data we receive on the tracks we can make available for licensing, whether these daily changes add tracks to or take tracks away from being live on the platform, in any particular country or all countries.

That's why it's always a good idea to license tracks as soon as you can, to avoid the small but real possibility they could be taken down at any time. When you do license a track, if we have to subsequently take it off our licensing platform, don’t worry - your license is still valid for the period for which you licensed it, it just potentially affects any further licensing of that track.

We’re always working to improve our technology so we can increase the number of tracks we have from our existing agreements, as well as signing new agreements. 

So, although we had a big jump recently, the number of tracks we have available for instant licensing will still keep on rising!