Transparency + Access: The Pillars of an Interconnected Data Ecosystem

Photo by Dawn McDonald

For years music publishers have learned to live within a strange paradigm. Chatter around the industry is endlessly about innovation, data, efficiency and the collaboration required to realise gains for all. Yet for all the discussion, the data sets relied upon for collecting and attributing royalties continue to operate with significant limitations- none of which need to be spelled out here. Publishers, despite best efforts, often only discover issues after value has already leaked.

Stripping away the complexity, these frustrations can be reduced to two fundamental and interlinked problems. Rights holders often cannot see what a society believes to be the truth about their catalog, and even when they can, they rarely have the tools to correct that data in a scalable, structured and hence automated way. Near everything else- delays, mismatches, and revenue leakage flows from these two constraints.

The bright side is that these are solvable problems- and in the last few years the tide has begun to turn.

Data Matters More Than Ever

This is not a new structural flaw, but its ramifications are being amplified more than ever. As we all know, music consumption is now global, continuous, and growing. Billions of micro-usages generate long-tail value that only materialises when the underlying data is correct. Repertoire moves across borders fluidly, passing between an interwoven web of DSPs, CMOs, sub-publishers, and administrators that must interoperate for royalties to (eventually) land in the right place.

In this environment, data itself has become a primary economic asset. Its value depends on the rights holder’s ability to understand and manage it. Transparency and Access have evolved from helpful attributes into operational necessities. Transparency allows publishers to understand the truth of another’s dataset, and access allows them to act on what they see. Without both, modern rights management is an impossible task. If my payment is reliant on another’s picture of my data, I should have transparency and access to that data to ensure I am paid quickly and accurately.

In what business is there no line of sight to incoming revenue- when it will arrive and how much when it does?

Transparency: Seeing What the System Knows

Transparency is the ability to look directly, and scalably, into a societies dataset. Not simply through limited portals or PDF summaries, but machine readable formats or via technological access- e.g. API. Historically, this has been the exception rather than the norm. 

Combining differing ‘views’ on what should be objective data is a thankless and incredibly complex task at scale (... just ask any society!). Millions of song registrations submitted by hundreds of thousands of members must all be drawn together, disambiguated and compiled (saying nothing of rights fragmentation making this an order of magnitude more difficult).

The same song is registered by different entities, who may each have a different view of it, or have a different data ‘completeness’ for it. Aligning these claims is challenging- a task often repeated inefficiently by 3rd hand sources without direct knowledge, or direct access to that knowledge. The crucial part here is- how do I (as a rights holder) know, scaleably, whether a song registration has ended up reflecting my claim, as I intended? I can look 1-by-1 (... -by-1, i.e. per society), but not in one place, and with prioritised discrepancies highlighted. Oftentimes I can’t even get back from a society their consolidated view on songs where I have an interest. We have an ecosystem where publishers and writers are directly impacted by accuracy, but are often deprived of visibility.

The nature of the MLC’s statutory requirement to make its data available and machine accessible has become an interesting global reference point. The visibility is not superficial; it is granular and programmatic. The concept has demonstrated that transparency can be built into the fabric of a society rather than bolted on as an afterthought, and that doing so raises the quality of the entire ecosystem by allowing everyone to see behind the curtain. Yes, it allows a ‘warts and all’ view of the state of the data, but that is the first of the 2 twin pillars required in democratising catalog clean up.

Encouragingly, others have begun following this same path. PRS’s Nexus initiative is a deliberate attempt to similarly provide clarity on works-recording matches. Songview also recently expanded beyond ASCAP and BMI to include both SESAC and GMR, offering a unified view of the US repertoire landscape in aid of reducing long-standing inconsistencies. The direction of travel is clear: societies are realising that there is more value in transparency than gatekeeping- and that it is incredibly attractive to rights holders in a competitive landscape.

Visibility Without Action Isn’t Enough

... but transparency alone doesn't fix problems- it merely reveals them. Once a publisher (or songwriter) can see that a society holds a conflicting registration or missing recording match the next question is inevitable: how can it be corrected? This was one of the reasons my startup Creatr Club struggled to gain traction- we couldn’t close the loop on actually solving the revenue-blocking data issues we were surfacing.

Societies that do provide visibility also sometimes rely on workflows that cannot scale- manual updates, one-by-one submissions, email threads, or forms processed in unpredictable cycles. There may be clarity, but not capability. In a catalog of tens of thousands of works, a “one work at a time” model is a bottleneck rather than a workflow.

Access is the missing counterpart to transparency. It is the ability for rights holders to submit structured corrections, update works in automated batches or resolve conflicts systematically. It is the difference between maintaining a catalog proactively rather than reactively. As catalogs grow, as micro-usages proliferate, and as AI expands the scope of repertoire and matching, scalable access is really a baseline requirement. Societies that understand this first will ultimately produce the cleanest, most trusted datasets, which in turn make them the most attractive to license rights through. Data. Always. Wins.

Levelling the Playing Field

Another important consequence of these shifts is the democratisation of capability. Transparency and access begin to erode information asymmetries that exist, and facilitate all to participate in data cleanup. A publisher with 500 works should have the same ability to audit and correct its data as one with 500,000. Micro-royalties accumulate the same way for both and long tail generates value for both. Errors leak value from both. If anything, smaller rights holders (down to the ‘atomic unit’ of rights holder- the creator themselves) suffer more acutely when they lack the means to view and correct data with scale.

By embedding transparency and access into their systems, societies not only improve data accuracy but also lower their own cost of doing so- at the same time levelling the operational playing field across the entire industry.

If you look ahead, the societies that will thrive are not those that continue operating as traditional collectors and distributors of royalties, but those that embrace the reality that they are now data platforms- tech companies really. Their core responsibility is licensing and paying rights holders, but that is only possible when they maintain accurate, discoverable, interoperable datasets and empower rights holders to participate in stewarding their entrusted catalog data with confidence.

The strongest societies of the next decade will be evaluated not just on their headline admin rates, but on how effectively they surface information and enable corrections. The value of a society will increasingly be measured by the clarity and accessibility of its data layer- everything else in rights management depends on it.

Foundations for the Next Decade of Publishing

Transparency and access are no longer optional features or modern conveniences. They are the table stakes on which a functional, global rights system is built. The MLC has shown what is possible when both principles are embedded deeply into a society’s infrastructure, with forward thinking societies like PRS and SACEM beginning to move in the same direction.

Ultimately, when rights holders can both see and fix their data, royalties can flow accurately. This raises confidence in data and reduces the entire industry's overhead. In real terms this means more money into the pockets of song writers- the real reason our entire industry exists.