Keeping PROs relevant in the age of streaming

Performance rights organizations (PROs) are tasked with enforcing copyright laws, meaning they try to identify what music is being broadcast or played and collect the appropriate royalties. This is the second of two short articles examining the role of PROs. The previous article focussed on the pre-digital age — radio, TV, live music and broadcasting in public spaces. This article will focus on streaming.

Stream When You’re Feeling Blue

Streaming services such as Spotify are relatively easy to monitor and attribute royalty payments. In fact, Spotify is now so huge it has direct deals with the three major record labels for rights to recording licenses.

However, YouTube is still bigger than Spotify, and the video platform continues to battle issues with music copyright theft by its users. Musicians have also expressed their frustration with “big tech companies” for growing their own revenues at the expense of artists and creators. YouTube does use an algorithm called Content ID to trawl videos for content that breaches copyright. However, in 2015, Universal Music Publishing Group alleged in a US Copyright Office filing that Content ID was failing to identify a significant proportion of its compositions on YouTube. Google, which owns YouTube, denied the allegation.

The ongoing issues with unattributed music on YouTube illustrate how many artists are likely to be missing out on their slice of the royalties pie.

There Is Another Way

Across each medium, there are too many opportunities for royalty earnings to simply leak away. While it’s impossible to quantify the precise amount lost, some estimates indicate that the value of the music industry could double if all royalties were rightly claimed. Imagine if we could put the “struggling musician” trope to bed, once and for all.

Now, technology is finally catching up with itself. Advances in artificial intelligence and data science mean that it’s becoming possible to monitor everything that’s being played — all the time.

At Utopia Music, we have developed a multifactorial big data engine (BDE) which is currently tracking over 100,000 radio stations. The BDE also has the potential to tap into music play data from a variety of sources, which in future could be expanded to live gigs, clubs, and TV.

By recording each play instance on the blockchain, payment of royalties can be automated with smart contracts. There would be no need to wait months or years for payments as they can be processed in real-time. Rather than today’s outdated model of monitoring, the Utopia system operates on a simple principle of “one play, one pay.”

The Times They Are A-Changin’

PROs exist to fill a legitimate gap between music copyright owners and those wanting to play. However, the transition to digital music has now made the PRO role all but impossible. They have no way to effectively monitor music plays, which is draining value from the music industry.

Emerging technologies provide the means of monitoring, attributing and compensating artists for their work, opening up revenue streams which are currently untapped. The Utopia solution gives PROs an unprecedented opportunity to serve their members more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Solving this challenge is an essential element to enhance an industry we profoundly love and believe in, in a way that benefits every single participant.

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