MBW Views is a series of op/eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. Here, Mark Douglas, Chief Information Officer, PPL, looks at the role played by identifiers in making sure the right money gets to the right people, the rising importance of IPNs and how they are being more effectively linked to ISNIs for industry-wide benefits…
It’s not every day a seven-figure payslip shows up unexpectedly in your inbox. That, however, is what happened to The White Lotus actor Tom Hollander earlier this year when he received an email informing him of an Avengers box office bonus payment.
Sadly, the elation did not last too long for Mr Hollander. It transpired that this money was destined for the Spider-Man star Tom Holland. Both actors shared the same agent for a short while, and an admin mishap resulted in the email landing in Mr Hollander’s inbox.
This was a single talent agency where two people shared a similar name. Imagine how this might play out in the wonderful world of music royalties. At PPL for example, we have several performers with the name Robert Smith registered with us, and that’s with no typos.
How do we ensure that Robert Smith from The Cure gets paid when Friday I’m In Love or Boys Don’t Cry are played in the UK and other markets where public performance rights exist? At the crux of it, is data, and in particular, identifiers – you knew I was going to go there but bear with me.
The music industry is making good progress in improving shared data to benefit both artists and rights-holders. We cannot underplay the power of authoritative data in improving the lives of those who work in this industry.
At PPL, we continue to champion several initiatives to connect the dots and help our members and partners across the industry become data rich. In processing a typical distribution to members, PPL generates around one billion rows of calculation data from our own systems and those of our collective management organisation (CMO) partners in other countries. The secret to ensuring that the data can work to everyone’s benefit is collaboration.
As a member of the Societies’ Council for the Collective Management of Performers’ Rights (SCAPR), the umbrella organisation for CMOs, we and the other members play a role in the design, development, and adoption of the Virtual Recordings Database (VRDB). This centralised database of repertoire and performer line-ups is collaboratively maintained by 61 CMO members who upload performer information onto it.
VRDB now has data relating to around 15 million sound recordings that is accessible to the SCAPR member CMOs, which has facilitated almost five million requests to add performers to line-ups on those recordings.
This improved way of managing recording and performer data has played a vital role in increasing the accuracy and speed of payments to performers across the globe.
The other crown jewel in SCAPR’s dataset is the International Performer Number (IPN), which have been assigned to over one million performers. Created, managed and distributed through SCAPR’s International Performer Database (IPD), IPNs are high-quality and authoritative identifiers.
Authoritative because the underlying metadata is based on membership contracts between performers and CMOs. And proof of identification (such as a passport) is required in order for an IPN to be generated. This means that a performer can only have one IPN, helping to ensure that they and they alone receive royalties due to them.
Over the last few years, there has been a concerted effort by SCAPR to disseminate and promote the use of the IPN more broadly across the industry to support the identification of performers throughout the supply chain.
“We champion initiatives to connect the dots and help members and partners become data rich.”
In October this year, it was announced that SoundExchange in the USA was to become the first non-SCAPR member to be authorised to create and issue IPNs. This move has the goal of improving the accuracy and speed of payments between SCAPR CMO members and SoundExchange.
SCAPR has gone one step further and extended partnerships outside the CMO landscape. It now has agreements with UMG, Warner Music Group, Beggars Group and others to enable them to use the IPN to improve their data quality.
If at this point you are thinking, ‘I’ve never heard of IPN, but I have heard of ISNI’, then hold that thought. Many rightsholders do indeed already use an identifier known as ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) to identify performers, particularly in their supply of data to DSPs.
The use of ISNIs extends far beyond the music value chain and acts as an identifier for all forms of creative participants, both real and fictional. Designed to act as an umbrella identifier, the ISNI spans all form of creation.
By way of example, Madonna will have an IPI as a songwriter, an IPN as a musical performer, as well as other identifiers for her roles as an author, actor etc.
The important distinction between an IPN and ISNI is that the former identifies a single human being whereas the latter identifies personas. Where artists work under multiple personas, each one they adopt can, and usually does, have an individual ISNI.
This can be critically important to creatives who do not wish their true identity to be widely known, and maintaining such privacy is sometimes baked into their creative contracts.
The upshot of all of this is that both identifiers have an important role to play. Debates around which one should prevail miss the point. They serve different purposes.
To get our job done as CMOs, the IPN is the more relevant and useful identifier. Distributing money around the globe, while respecting relevant international tax rules, requires organisations like PPL to know about residency, tax status, bank accounts etc. The IPN is better designed to help us handle this.
The diligence and control that is applied in creating and assigning a new IPN makes it a more robust identifier to underpin money flows. The ISNI, on the other hand, has gained significant traction with DSPs and is included in many data feeds from labels to DSPs.
The progress made in respect of ISNIs and IPNs over recent years affords the industry a great opportunity. If only we could link the two identifiers, then we could eliminate considerable effort across the CMO world in trying to reliably identify performers using their name, date of birth or whatever other attributes we happen to have.
There are two strands of work being undertaken to realise this opportunity. Firstly, SCAPR is initiating a project to match and link IPNs to ISNIs. This will look at linking the large set of identifiers that have already been created and at how ISNIs and IPNs could be linked at the point of creation in the future.
Secondly, several of the leading record companies are undertaking in-house projects to link their own internal artist IDs to both the ISNI and IPN databases. As identified earlier, SCAPR has facilitated this exercise by opening up both an IPN search API and an IPN creation API.
These two project strands are timely developments as the industry makes a push to increase the quality and completeness of music metadata. SCAPR and the record companies pushing this forward are to be lauded for having the vision and focus to invest resources into making it happen.
They are examples of the industry collaborating for the greater good just as it does on technical solutions and education for the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) metadata working group. Collaboration is central to PPL’s philosophy – we strive to remove cost from the wider industry and sharing metadata and systems is one way we do that.
This helps to ensure our members receive meaningful returns for their work and build sustainable careers and businesses.
The IPN helps performers get paid for their work and is a high-quality data point for rights-holders that will help close gaps as it is disseminated more widely across the ecosystem. In the UK, the adoption of performer IDs and linking ISNI to IPN should make a significant contribution to the IPO-led commitment to improve music metadata.
There is no doubt that the IPN is going to become a more prominent identifier in the flow of data around the world in the years to come and pay dividends for many.Music Business Worldwide
