For most music industry insiders, what I’m about to share may seem obvious, but as a newcomer, it was eye-opening.
Attending the Summus Summit (https://lnkd.in/d5UhwqSC) gave me perspective on how the music industry functions, offering a behind-the-scenes look that I hadn’t fully grasped before.
I heard over and over the term “fragmented”, which describes the music industry’s landscape where ownership of catalogues is scattered among various entities.
This fragmentation means that often no single organization or individual has complete control over the rights to a particular piece of music, leading to complexities in licensing, distribution, and revenue sharing.
This causes a lot of problems, and it’s a mess. Sometimes, rights owners don’t even agree on who owns what and this actually happens 15% of the time on streaming services. This is called “a conflict” and can occur when certain works are over-claimed.
The music industry decided not to have any centralized database, and had to build a whole industry around the problems that this creates.
This industry supports an ecosystem that relies on navigating these complexities. As a result, there’s little incentive to push for a major overhaul, as too many stakeholders benefit from maintaining the status quo.
This leads to redundancy and a lack of shared infrastructure, which slows down the entire industry’s ability to adapt to changes such as streaming and, more recently, artificial intelligence.
I may be a bit naive, but I genuinely believe that implementing a shared open-source infrastructure could address many of the music industry’s challenges and accelerate progress.
Monitoring whether catalogues are being played is also a challenge. Frequently, the actual songs being played are approximated, as usage data is often collected through surveys.
I also realized that it’s difficult for music rights holders to enforce their rights, largely because most people are not well-informed about music rights. One potential solution is to educate the public, and lawsuits are effective at capturing people’s attention.
Unfortunately, I can’t share more because “what happens at Summus stays at Summus” sorry 🙂