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.

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.