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Dancing Queen is literally, T-000.000.001-0. So let's do something anyone reading this can replicate, and take a look at the databases- The MLC's public search, PRS's works search, ASCAP's and BMI's repertoire tools- and look up Dancing Queen to see how the ISWC has fared in its 30+ years of history.

The Leakage Ledger is a recurring edition where I’ll publish actual numbers from actual catalog work. Anonymised (obviously) and stripped of anything identifying- but real. One catalog, the findings, and what they were worth. No thesis to defend, just the pure maths. Tangible numbers- those that you can see, touch and feel, change that conversation. A publisher can't benchmark themselves against a sentiment, but they can absolutely benchmark themselves against a percentage.

Last year I wrote about real issues to be found in the MLC’s dataset- an exploration of what was really sitting inside the industry's most transparent copyright dataset. The headline then: the MLC reported around 90% of royalty value matched, while our analysis showed only 22% of ISRCs had been attributed to any work- some 170 million of 217 million recordings sitting unlinked, with the long tail holding more recoverable money than the industry's hits-first workflows were eve

Every catalog acquisition starts in the same place. A data room opens, and inside sits the familiar furniture: a stack of royalty statements, some contract summaries, perhaps a seller-commissioned earnings report with a decay curve that always seems to flatten out at exactly the right moment (funny that). And at the centre of it all, the schedule of works- the document that defines what is actually for sale.

Most catalog cleanup projects begin in a familiar place- are the right recordings attached to the right works. Are all the ISRCs present? Are they linked to the correct compositions? The difficulty is that recording-work matching relies on a much deeper assumption: that the list of works being matched to is itself clean.

US termination rights have been somewhat of an industry secret in times gone by- and understandably so given their creator friendly purpose. For any not familiar, this is the legal right of a songwriter to reclaim US rights they have previously transferred (say under a publishing deal) after 35 years. These sit quietly inside a catalog for years, sometimes decades, looking like a future technicality rather than a present commercial issue.

If publishers want to use AI meaningfully, they first need to know whether their own data is in a fit state to support it. Publishing data is not a neat database of facts waiting to be queried. It is a living, fragmented, territory-specific web of claims, registrations and human judgement. Anyone who has spent any length of time inside the operational machinery of publishing knows this instinctively- this is the world AI is entering.

AI is forcing every business to ask a difficult question: what work actually needs a human, and why? ‘Work’ is context, judgement, memory (personal and corporate), relationships, accountability, taste, intuition and the ability to discern why something matters in the first place. If those things are stripped out too quickly, the short-term efficiency gain can become a long-term organisational cost.

A significant portion of the last decade in the Music Industry has been spent discussing capital inflows. Billions has poured into catalogs, billions into infrastructure and billions into technology and platforms. This week the latest turn in that saga is being reported- that Sony Music Group is in advanced talks to acquire Recognition for $4Bn. This is particularly illustrative of a wider dynamic emerging across the market- how does the money leave?

There’s a predictable moment in the life of a growing business as operations, departments and processes mature and become engrained. More data, more stakeholders, more decisions. What once felt intuitive begins to feel fragmented, with questions taking longer to answer and conversations starting to loop. Teams begin to operate with slightly different assumptions and understandings about the same reality. Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel It is a natural evolution in the growth cyc

For all the noise around AI over the past year- new models, new capabilities, new fear- the most important developments haven’t been technical, but structural. In recent months, the UK government has tried to start defining an approach to one of the most consequential economic questions of the next decade: How do you build a world-leading AI sector without undermining the value of the content it depends on?

Everyone in publishing knows the simple truth- there shouldn’t be missing royalties in the digital age and there is a tax to identifying and retrieving them. The explosion in the number of recordings being released and songs being registered is still stretching the system- leaving billions in royalties that remain unclaimed or misallocated ($196m at The MLC minimum at the time of writing). If optimising royalties has a necessary cost, it begs a nuanced question: who should f

Since The MLC’s inception in 2018 through to the start of its start of distributions in 2021 and beyond it has been closely watched- by the market at large, by key stake holding publishers and by compatriot CMOs the world over. from next year there is to be a material change in how monies are distributed- Pro-rata payouts

As we all know, the conversation around music catalog investments has become increasingly sophisticated as the asset class has matured. The ability to identify, administer, and ultimately collect the income attached to rights is a deep specialism- and one that cannot be synthesized or sidestepped by AI.

In the past month alone we’ve seen three announcements that are as fascinating individually as they are illustrative collectively. Primary Wave in talks to acquire Kobalt. BMG reportedly exploring a deal for Concord. The now-concluded acquisition of Downtown by Universal Music Group Each headline by itself is significant, but taken together they suggest something more structural is currently at play. A re-majorisation of the music business.

There was a moment, not that long ago, when music rights acquisitions felt almost mechanical- streaming growth was steady, capital was abundant. The underwriting conversation revolved around a small set of variables: historical cashflow, growth assumptions, discount rate, and multiple. If you believed in the long-term durability and expansion of streaming, the rest followed.

On Spotify’s latest earnings call, there was a few moments, including the quote “Technology is seldom disruptive on its own. Significant disruption happens when new technologies enable new asymmetric business models.” The real question isn’t whether AI is powerful, but whether it enables new business models entirely.

Music rights are nuanced, and always have been. Creative collaboration, shared ownership, territorial differences, long tails of value, and cultural context are all part of what makes music operationally distinct from many other industries. There is, however, an important distinction to be made between nuance and friction.

“We are a defacto data company. We don’t work in the music industry- we work in the data industry.” This quote from Caroline Champarnaud of SACEM speaks deeply to the operational reality of a modern collecting society- though it resonates far beyond that context, into the very fabric of music publishing and copyright administration in the modern age. The more I’ve thought about it since, the more it feels like an accurate description of the publishing ecosystem.

Last week I was at Music Ally Connect in London- and as you can well imagine AI took it’s usual place as the topic du jour. Despite being well trodden ground there was some fascinating elements- both trends from the day at large and specific comments that gave insight to how the Music industry is currently both thinking about and preparing for (/guarding against) AI. Mostly these broadly fell into 3 camps- intense negativity, bullish positivity and cautious ambivalence.