Indiefy, an Indie Record Label & Distributor Platform, Supports Emerging Artists While Verifying Copyright Ownership
From its launch in 2016 in Guadalajara, Mexico as a music distribution service and label, Indiefy understood the importance of providing aspiring indie artists an excellent user experience while seamlessly uploading tracks free of copyright claims to digital service providers (DSPs). Striking the balance of servicing its subscribers and ensuring smooth operations, including copyright compliance, Indiefy not only built relationships with artists around the world but also maintained the platform’s status with DSPs.
Indiefy regards automatic content recognition technology as crucial to ensure the integrity of their supply chain and catalog, and to preserve their status as a trusted supplier to the leading music DSPs. Early on, Indiefy had chosen a vendor whose service was not as accurate as they needed and was forced to manually review any identified files from the vendor. They found the vendor’s service:
- Misidentified files as containing copyrighted music when they actually did not (aka false positives), falsely accusing an artist of misappropriation.
- Correctly identified files with copyrighted music but referencing the wrong metadata.
With a strong commitment to delivering reliable and affordable service, Indiefy wanted to avoid providing inaccurate data, falsely accusing an artist of copyright infringement and holding up his or her music from uploading to DSPs. The team knew the overhead of manually reviewing files could not be sustained and began looking for another automated content recognition solution (ACR).
RightsRx™– The Highest Accuracy for Any Budget
After reaching out to Audible Magic, the Indiefy team was pleasantly surprised at the various affordable service options for RightsRx, built using Audible Magic’s content identification technology – known for its accurate identification rates and virtually zero false positives. The development team also found it easy to install and use, speeding the time-to-market for deployment into production.
RightsRx compares tracks to music from more than 140,000 music labels from over 150 different territories in Audible Magic’s authoritative database and responds in seconds with a match or no match. If there is a match, it will display the conflicting rightsholder.
“The accuracy and the lack of human intervention not only builds our reputation for professionalism with indie artists, but also with DSPs that expect a clean catalog from Indiefy,” comments Gilberto Avalos, Founder and CEO at Indiefy. “The fire and forget aspect of RightsRx allows the team at Indiefy to focus on developing our platform and building artists’ careers.”
Challenge: Ensuring a clean supply chain of new artist tracks free of copyrighted content conflicts.
Solution: Scanning audio tracks before uploading to DSPs with RightsRx.
Key Requirements: Accuracy, scalability, and ease of use.
Apple's & Spotify's Distributor Tiers Raise the bar for Catalog Management
Audible Magic Offers New Services to Manage Distribution Conflicts
In 2018, the top digital service providers (DSPs) publicized their preferred distribution partners and their ranking criteria. For Apple, whose ranking criteria includes exceptional content review" and "low rejection rate," CD Baby and The Orchard made the "Preferred Plus" list. For Spotify, whose criteria lists "preventing infringement content," The Orchard made the "Preferred" list while CD Baby made the various "Recommended" partner lists.
a 9.2% increase over 2017 - Buzz Angle
The challenge of adhering to these strict DSP guidelines while the keeping pace with the huge growth in the space is daunting for digital distributors. Digital distributors must manage current catalogs and ingest large numbers of tracks every day in an efficient and cost-effective way. Buzz Angle Music’s 2018 report on U.S. music consumption indicated that the number of unique titles audio-streamed was 36.3M tracks, a 9.2% increase over 2017. The sheer number of tracks eliminates manual review and metadata checks prove to be unreliable.
As a result, digital distributors use automated content recognition (ACR) technologies to scan new releases, as well as their back catalog, to ensure they can meet these strict content review requirements. A distributor can improve their overall score and ranking if they can deliver a clean catalog that doesn’t create a lot of copyright ownership conflicts at a DSP. The impact on their business is significant. For example, as an Apple Music Preferred Plus distributor a company will have access to support for advanced customer features and analytics as well as early access to product features.
Audible Magic’s newly launched services, RightsAudit™ and RightsRx™ are a great cost-effective way to proactively identify potential ownership conflicts prior to delivering to a DSP. Audible Magic’s ACR technology combined with one of the most comprehensive and most up-to-date reference databases in the world provides a highly accurate and method to compare audio and video recordings.
Learn more about The Orchard and CD Baby partnering with Audible Magic for catalog management.
Crunch Digital Announces RegistryID™ and Strategic Partnership With Audible Magic to Streamline Licensing and Reporting to Record Labels and Music Publishers
Crunch Digital Forms Strategic Partnership with Audible Magic
Los Angeles, CA, October 28, 2014 - Today Crunch Digital, the data management and reporting service that bridges digital rights owners with content licensees, is announcing RegistryID™, their new system that will streamline music licensing and reporting. As an integral part of the RegistryID system, Crunch Digital has entered a strategic partnership with Audible Magic, the leader in automated content recognition (ACR) solutions for copyrighted content.
Matching music to copyright ownership data affects many digital services, apps and games. Finding the correct copyright owners and verifying licensing can become a monumental barrier for digital services. Over the last four years, Crunch Digital developed one of the most comprehensive registries for sound recording and musical composition metadata in the world. The release of RegistryID™, expected early next year, will enable distributors to verify licensing rights with music publishers for their content worldwide, ensuring that proper permissions have been obtained before the work is made available on their platform. RegistryID™ will be integrated with Crunch Digital's existing data management and reporting solutions.
When content is added to a provider's platform, RegistryID will use Audible Magic's fingerprinting solution to match the content against registered sound recordings. If a match is found, RegistryID will then associate registered content with an underlying musical composition and its owners or administrators. Then the system can determine if a license is in effect for the musical composition to ultimately "block" or "allow" use on the platform based on licensing terms specified by the provider.
"Crunch Digital's RegistryID addresses a problem we have seen for years in the digital marketplace," said Vance Ikezoye, Audible Magic's CEO. "Being able to match sound recordings to the underlying composition and verifying licenses can certainly enable access to more music for many delivery platforms."
"We are excited to work with Audible Magic to enable our RegistryID," said Keith Bernstein, founder of Crunch Digital. "Their fingerprinting technology allows us to deliver fast, robust responses to our customers so that they can focus on the customer experience without worrying about copyright issues."
About Audible Magic Audible Magic is the trusted leader in automatic content recognition (ACR) fingerprinting technologies. The company offers a broad range of hosted solutions as well as hardware and software products that identify audio and video content, synchronize actions between media devices, trigger user interactivity, generate usage reporting and activate content monetization. Audible Magic's customers and partners span technology, entertainment and media industries.
About Crunch Digital Crunch Digital™ is an independent technology firm whose mission is to eliminate the barriers of licensing and payments in the media & entertainment marketplace, fueling better revenue flow, improving business intelligence, and reducing operating costs for content licensees and content owners. Crunch Digital manages data flow for content licensees - digital service providers, multi-channel networks, game companies, app developers and mobile carriers - including royalty reporting for direct licenses. Crunch Digital also services content owners - including record labels, music publishers, audio book publishers, film & television studios and game publishers.