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

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.