EMS and Audible Magic Tackle Industry-Wide Issue of Verifying Music Rights Ownership
Audible Magic’s RightsRx enables EMS to proactively protect artists from fraudulent ownership claims
Los Gatos, Calif. – Nov. 17, 2020 – The Encoding Management Service (EMS), a technology service provider for digital music, audiobooks and eBooks, announced it has partnered with Audible Magic, the gold standard for content identification and leading provider of rights management and automatic content recognition (ACR) solutions. EMS is using Audible Magic’s RightsRx™ to prevent an industry-wide concern of fraudulent ownership claims by bad actors, attempting to steal revenues from the legitimate artists and rightsholders.
“There’s no question that Audible Magic is the partner of choice to help strengthen our rights management procedures, given their industry standard trusted and proven technology,” said Chris Bornefeld-Ettmann, EMS managing director. “We’re thrilled at how easily and quickly we implemented RightsRx into our existing workflow.”
Audible Magic’s RightsRx enables EMS to resolve ownership conflict claims prior to upload by identifying fraudulent submissions, as well as catalog conflicts when artists submit through multiple distributors.
“EMS is a major industry player and their effort underlines the continued trend of distributors proactively managing their catalogs to prevent unauthorized music from entering the digital music ecosystem,” said Vance Ikezoye, president and chief executive officer at Audible Magic. “We’re the best solution in the industry to ensure distributors can keep their catalogs clean from unauthorized content.”
Every month, Audible Magic searches billions of files looking for copyright content registered by over 140,000 record labels and music publishers. Its comprehensive reference registry contains tens of millions of registered works representing music from over 150 territories, with hundreds of thousands of new tracks added each month. Search results operate on files as short as five seconds and typically complete in one second or less, with virtually zero false positives.
For additional information, visit https://www.audiblemagic.com/rightsrx/.
About Audible Magic
For more than 20 years, Audible Magic has innovated solutions to identify content, manage rights, and monetize media. Audible Magic’s Emmy-winning automatic content recognition (ACR) technology powers billions of transactions monthly. The Silicon Valley pioneer is the trusted intermediary among rightsholders (including labels, studios, distributors, publishers, and collectives) and major platforms. For more information, visit https://www.audiblemagic.com/.
About EMS
The Encoding Management Service - EMS GmbH is a technology service provider for the digital entertainment industry. For more than 10 years now, EMS’ logistical solutions for digital contents enable fast and secure ripping, encoding and delivery of audio, video and eBook data to online retailers, aggregators and other services worldwide. EMS is one of Spotify’s recommended Delivery Platforms and listed Encoding House with Apple. EMS’ clients’ roster includes renowned distributors such as GoodToGo, Indigo, mbassador, TBA, Tonpool Digital, wordandsound and ZEBRALUTION. EMS is a member of the ZEBRALUTION Group since July 2019.
Contact:
Adriana Saldaña
Sterling Communications
[email protected]
+1 408-395-5500
EMS connects with Audible Magic - MusikWoche
The Leverkusen-based digital service provider Encoding Management Service (EMS) will in the future rely on the collaboration with Audible Magic in matters of content recognition and rights management and will use the RightsRx solution from the Californian company.
Read the full article by MusikWoche here.
Novecore Delivers Lightning-Fast, Affordable Music Distribution While Protecting Artists With Audible Magic’s RightsRx™
Novecore has built its business on providing exceptional speed in music distribution at an affordable price, often uploading songs in less than a day to top music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music (MSS). The startup understands the challenges of fledgling musicians and offers pricing of 15% of royalties, which can change to a monthly fee of five dollars as the artist becomes established. Artists can also access an innovative online credit card and can use their royalties directly from their Novecore account.
A Business Built on Speed and Accuracy
Integral to Novecore’s business is the ability to ensure copyright compliance and maintain a preferred status with music streaming services by swiftly and accurately scanning tracks using an automatic content recognition (ACR) service before upload.
Many top music streaming services expect distributors to use ACR to scan tracks for copyrighted music prior to submission. The cost-conscious startup initially chose another ACR vendor but started to experience issues with identifications that required costly human intervention. These included:
- Files misidentified as containing copyrighted music (false positives)
- Files that the service incorrectly claimed has no copyrighted music (false negatives)
Both types of inaccuracies are bad news for music distributors and creators.
Distributors take great care to create a seamless user experience. Falsely accusing a creator of infringement creates a bad user experience, slows distribution, and undermines the credibility of the distributor.
False negatives put the distributor’s preferred status with the music streaming services at risk by allowing copyrighted material to upload.
Accuracy at an Affordable Price - RightsRx
Novecore moved to RightsRx from Audible Magic, a service known for its high accuracy and affordability. Novecore was processing tracks in less than a day without assistance from the support team at Audible Magic. The company now scans tracks against Audible Magic’s authoritative database, which includes over 140,000 labels from all over the world.
One registration to manage tracks across UGC hosting platforms
In addition, Novecore submits tracks to the Audible Magic free registry to protect their artists content on UGC hosting platforms. With one registration, Novecore can set rules for usage across many UGC hosting platforms.
“We are confident that we can take care of our artists and maintain our preferred status with digital streaming platforms because of the accuracy that RightsRx provides,” comments Matthias Merkel, Chief Operating Officer. “With Audible Magic’s registry, we can manage the appropriate use of music across major UGC platforms for our clients. The combined services help prevent inappropriate use and protect artists both before and after distribution.“
Challenge: Ensuring a clean supply chain of new artist tracks free of copyright conflicts to maintain preferred status with music streaming services.
Solution: Scanning audio tracks prior to upload to music streaming services with RightsRx and registering content with Audible Magic to manage use across multiple platforms.
Key Requirements: Accuracy, scalability, worldwide depth of the reference database.
Audible Magic Inks Global Partnership with DistroKid to Verify Music Authenticity
Amidst news of unreleased music impersonators, partnership ensures protection of artist’s original content on music streaming services and social platforms
June 12, 2019 (LOS GATOS, Calif.) – Audible Magic, music’s industry standard for content identification linked to digital rights, announced a strategic partnership with leading music distribution service DistroKid to combat the rising trend of “fraudulent artists” stealing and uploading unreleased original content. The move will help protect artists worldwide by verifying the authenticity of both tracks and artists that the music originated from before music is distributed to streaming services.
When an artist requests to upload song files via DistroKid, Audible Magic’s RightsRx™ solution checks its comprehensive registry of over 20 million media assets to ensure the artist-uploaded content is conflict-free before distribution to streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and more. In its ongoing effort to promote artist authenticity, DistroKid will also be the first distributor to implement Audible Magic’s cutting-edge detection tool, Broad Spectrum. An extension of Audible Magic’s content identification service, Broad Spectrum can uniquely identify extreme manipulations of rate, pitch and tempo using only small clips of audio.
“In this day and age, it’s imperative for artists everywhere to register their content to not only claim ownership, avoiding impersonators, but to also ensure that they are being accurately credited and compensated,” said Vance Ikezoye, president and chief executive officer at Audible Magic. “DistroKid has a positive reputation amongst artists for making distribution fast, reliable and easy. This partnership signals our joint commitment to an industry working towards clean data, proper rights management and improved artist attribution.”
Additionally, in response to the increase in fake artists attempts to steal and distribute unreleased music, DistroKid is announcing a new and free service called DistroLock (https://distrolock.com). Launching today, DistroLock allows any musical artist to upload and register their unreleased audio files through the platform, which will encode a unique audio fingerprint and add it to Audible Magic’s registry. DistroKid developed this platform with Audible Magic’s insights as an industry-wide solution that will request to block the unauthorized release of an artist’s music (or “leaks”) from appearing on streaming services and social platforms. DistroLock also includes an API that will allow other distributors and streaming services to easily validate the authenticity of music uploaded to their respective platforms before making it available to the public.
“Until now, there hasn’t been a definitive way for artists to say, ‘this is my audio, don’t let anyone else release it,’” said DistroKid chief executive officer Philip Kaplan. “With the launch of DistroLock, any musician can preemptively register their
audio to help ensure that unauthorized releases don’t see the light of day. This partnership with Audible Magic and the creation of DistroLock will help artists by ensuring that their original content is uploaded and distributed fairly, with accuracy and speed.”
About DistroKid
DistroKid was founded in 2013 to provide musicians, managers, and record labels with online tools and services that are innovative, easy-to-use, and affordable. More than 400,000 artists rely on DistroKid and include hobbyists, up-and-coming musicians, top YouTubers, and international superstars like 21 Savage, Ludacris, Will Smith, Tom Waits, and more. DistroKid’s expanding array of services include music distribution, monetization, metadata customization, storage, and promotion. DistroKid’s small staff, coupled with largely automated backend, has enabled DistroKid to process more than 7 million songs—while simultaneously providing fast, personal & friendly customer service to artists of every size.
About Audible Magic
For more than 20 years, Audible Magic has continuously created innovative, industry-leading solutions that protect digital media and accelerate its monetization. An Emmy-winning pioneer in proprietary content recognition solutions, its core identification platform performs billions of nearly instantaneous content match transactions every month. Audible Magic has become the trusted intermediary between the majority of rightsholders (music labels, distributors, publishers and collectives) and digital service providers (such as Facebook, SoundCloud, Dailymotion, and Twitch), navigating the complexities of content identification, ownership determination, and rights administration.
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.
CD Baby and Audible Magic Team Up to Ensure Quality Partnership with Artists and Music Services
Portland, Oregon, (April 16, 2019) – Artist Service Provider CD Baby is partnering with Audible Magic – the music industry’s go-to expert in digital content identification, licensing, and monetization – to increase content protection for artists and labels. As part of the partnership, CD Baby will use Audible Magic’s RightsRx™ service to identify content rights conflicts prior to delivery to a Digital Service Provider (DSP), ensuring that CD Baby remains a trusted distribution partner of digital platforms worldwide.
As streaming continues to grow exponentially, both companies are at the center of one of the music business’s greatest opportunities and biggest challenges: How do distributors and artist service companies concurrently manage growing data volumes, comply with DSP requirements, and still provide the best service to musicians, all in a cost-effective manner?
“Audible Magic is an essential element that enables us to play our role in the music business,” said CD Baby Vice President Kevin Breuner. “Their powerful identification technology allows us to serve our artists – and the platforms and services they rely on – quickly and fairly.”
When a user requests to upload files, RightsRx™ allows CD Baby to check Audible Magic’s comprehensive registry of over 30 million media assets. RightsRx™then indicates if the file is a duplicate of another audio track in the system, or if it is a potentially suspicious file. CD Baby can proactively decline to upload the file in question, rather than reactively taking it down at a later time due to a potentially costly rights conflict. In the vast majority of cases, however, files will upload seamlessly and be ready for distribution.
“CD Baby plays a vital role in the independent music community. We look forward to supporting their ongoing efforts to provide the highest quality of service to their artists and maintain strong relationships with the DSPs,” said Vance Ikezoye, President and CEO at Audible Magic.
RightsRx™ is part of a bigger strategy at CD Baby to be the best partner possible to diverse music services and an even more diverse community of artists. This demands constant learning, extensive tech savvy, and real creativity.
“We’re doing everything in our power to provide digital partners with data and assets that boost our artists. We want to create the best experience via these partnerships,” said MJ Woodis, CD Baby’s Director of Digital Operations who leads a 15-person team that addresses this challenge. “We work closely with DSPs, and it’s often more of a conversation, not just rules laid down. The heart of the matter is not to restrict as we get them music and data, and to enable search and other discovery methods to help our artists. It’s a growing process.”
About CD Baby
CD Baby is one of the largest distributors of independent music on the planet, home to 650,000 artists and more than 9 million tracks that are made available to 100+ digital services and platforms around the globe. Artists on the platform are empowered to monetize their rights while maintaining control of their own careers and have collectively earned over $600 million since the company’s founding. CD Baby’s Publishing Administration service allows over 160,000 songwriters to collect all of their publishing royalties and currently administers over 1 million songs.
About Audible Magic
For more than 20 years, Audible Magic has continuously created innovative, industry-leading solutions that protect digital media and accelerate its monetization. An Emmy-winning pioneer in proprietary content recognition solutions, its core identification platform performs billions of nearly instantaneous content match transactions every month. Audible Magic has become the trusted intermediary between the majority of rightsholders (music labels, distributors, publishers and collectives) and digital service providers (such as Facebook, SoundCloud, Dailymotion, and Twitch), navigating the complexities of content identification, ownership determination, and rights administration.
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