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.

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.

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.