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30 September 2022CopyrightSarah Speight

Music collective to release data to boost artist royalties

Rights-management collective to publish key global metadata on free portal | Artists will be have greater visibility and control over millions of musical works | Tool will ensure artists are ‘properly paid’ and credited.

PRS for Music, a British music rights management collective, has announced it will launch a new online portal that will publish global songwriter and composer credits alongside other key data for the first time.

The organisation, which is made up of two collection societies—the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society and the Performing Right Society—will release metadata attributed to more than two million musical works, with plans to release millions more over the following 12 months.

PRS for Music said it is “determined to remove key barriers to the flow of royalties worldwide, ultimately improving the matching of sound recordings and musical works and increasing the speed and accuracy of royalty payments”.

The free tool, which will be launched in early 2023, will give songwriters, composers and music publishers greater visibility and increased control over their data, alongside the ability to search and download key data about their works, according to PRS.

It will also allow them to highlight any discrepancies, offering digital service providers (DSPs) access to writer information, thereby facilitating more songwriter credits on streaming services.

The government’s Digital Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee’s ‘Economics of music streaming’ report, published in July 2021, flagged the need for greater availability and transparency of industry metadata, and how improvements to the system were needed to speed up the flow of royalties to music creators.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) also carried out a full market study into music streaming and the dominance of the major music groups, first published in January 2022 (a final report will be published in January 2023).

While the report indicated good consumer experience and increased access and exposure for artists, it found that the majority of artists do not make substantial earnings via streaming.

‘Stronger global royalty system’

PRS CEO, Andrea Czapary Martin, said of the new portal: “We're putting the power of metadata into the hands of creators for their benefit. Clean data directs the flow of royalties and is the key to ensuring that songwriters and music publishers are properly paid for the use of their music and are given credit for their songs. This is fundamental to securing a stronger global royalty system.”

The portal will give access to data such as writer and composer names, the musical work and recording title(s), the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC), the International Standard Works Code (ISWC), the Interested Parties Identifier (IPI) numbers, as well as the Tunecode (PRS’s unique identifier).

A core element of the site will be the publication of links between the ISRC and ISWC identifiers, an essential element in identifying the musical works online. PRS said that “trust and visibility in these key identifiers are critical to improving the claiming and distributing of royalties to songwriters, composers and publishers”.

PRS has convened a consortium of industry experts, including DSPs, record labels, music publishers and other rights management organisations to support the design and implementation of the new service.

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