One of the toughest shifts for me, when I moved from catalog to front-line releases in 2009, was how often label copy didn’t have confirmed writer and publisher information at time of release. We’d still be wrangling splits and confirming ownership months after the release was out the door. The identifiers get backfilled once things trickle in. The industry has gotten into the habit of treating delivery as the start of the paperwork rather than the finish line, and the systems around us mostly let us get away with it.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.