Griffin O’Neill recently joined the Equalizer team as a summer intern, and was immediately tasked with digging into data and rights research for some indie artists. This is the same type of publishing ownership research that I had to do early in my career and, although there are more public databases to search than there were back then, many of the same problems with identifying ownership still persist decades later.

The thing with puzzles is that you can’t just grab pieces from the pile and start putting them together, and a single puzzle piece in isolation won’t show you the whole picture. Similarly, without a data strategy, it’s hard to see the complete picture and how each piece can be leveraged effectively as part of the whole.

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, I wanted to take a moment to look at the 2025 report “Inclusion in the Music Business” from the team at USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, in partnership with Believe and Tunecore.

As much data as we produce within the music industry, there are other industries that play a direct part in providing key metadata that allows us to properly track and compensate artists, songwriters, and rights owners, for their work. A cue sheet is an example of this, but many in the music industry aren’t familiar with their importance.

In the music industry, we are creating data faster than ever before. It’s well known that the data is often incomplete and inconsistent, or riddled with typos and duplications, leading to inefficiencies and inaccurate analysis. I often hear talk about data cleaning, but a point of failure arises when data cleaning initiatives aren’t approached with a corresponding strategy for ongoing input of high-quality inbound data as well.

2024 was brought to me by the letter C - conferences, community, collaboration, (and coffee). It marked the first full year for Equalizer Consulting, which has been exhilarating, but not without challenges faced by any small business owner.

I just got back from a week in DC, spending time with the crew at SoundExchange, who continue to do amazing work in support of artists. On my last day there, I had a few hours to play tourist, so wandered through the impressive streets of the capital city. I saw the Presidential Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, and then headed over to the Library of Congress.

I had the pleasure of taking my little superfans to the Twenty One Pilots show at the newly minted Intuit Dome here in LA. Sharing some thoughts on the data collection via the venue app.

We’re taking a little deviation from my usual metadata posts to explore some musical references found on my travels to Vancouver and Alaska.

When applying tags to a piece of music, whether a sound recording or a musical work, there are certain elements that are indisputable - such as musical key, BPM, and whether it's instrumental or acoustic. However, many other tags encompassing genre, sub-genre, mood, lyrical theme, etc., can be much more complex to navigate.

Matching recordings to their underlying compositions is an intricately complex music industry puzzle. While it's something that inherently seems like it should be fairly straight forward, this process poses significant challenges.

Unlike in industries where legal name is the norm, the party or person identifier can be complex in the music space. Consider the two standard data identifiers for names in music: International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) and Interested Party Information (IPI). Seems simple enough but only one of them (IPI) is the industry norm, and most of the time they don't travel together.

One might think that publishing data is all confirmed by the time an album is released, but it is frequently not the case. At the time of release, the label copy (core metadata) for the recording is often incomplete when it comes to songwriters and other participants.

When thinking about rights ownership data in music, the music publishing world is incredibly complex. There are a number of reasons for this, so let's take a look at the lifecycle of music publishing data and how it gets fragmented.