Quansic's FX Nuttall wants ISNI identifiers 'everywhere'

By Emmanuel Legrand

Getting the metadata right has become priority number one for the rights management community. In the music sector, ISRCs (recordings) and ISWCs (compositions) are the key identifiers, but what if ISNIs were the missing link? Such is the belief of French metadata expert FX Nuttall (FX stands for François-Xavier).

  ISNI, or International Standard Name Identifier, is an International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO 27729)-certified global standard number for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works, including researchers, inventors, writers, artists, visual creators, performers, producers, publishers, aggregators, and more.

    In 2019, Nuttall set up Quansic, a new Swiss-based company that aims to connect ISNIs with other identifiers to provide a database with the most accurate and complete set of data relating to artists.  At Quansic, Nuttall has set out to find an answer to the proliferation of unmatched data.

  “The problem is that there are many sound-alike names and they are badly identified,” says Nuttall. “Take Bliss, for example. There's quite a few of them. For users, it is difficult to know which is which, and for platforms, when they get a new album by Bliss, they're not sure where to put it. So the solution is to put ISNI everywhere.” 

  Nuttall, who founded his first music metadata company, AudioSoft, in 1995, is no stranger to ISNI. While working as a consultant for 10 year for CISAC, the International confederation of Societies of Authors and composers, overseeing their International Standards initiatives, was editor of the ISO 27729:2012 International Standard Name Identifier and then founder and Chairman of the ISNI International Agency.

  Nuttall also spent seven years working for Google and affiliate YouTube, at their Publishing operations in charge of data quality. “I convinced YouTube to become an ISNI agency and we rolled out ISNI throughout YouTube's systems,” says Nuttall.

  “The benefits of ISNI are that it is an open system that identifies the names of parties, whereas a lot of the other well-known party identifiers are proprietary and private – such as IPI and IPN,” explains Mark Isherwood of the Digital Data Exchange (DDEX) Secretariat. “ISNI can also be used as a bridging identifier between those proprietary identifiers which sometimes have associated with them, confidential information.”

An important identifier

  For Isherwood, ISNI is becoming “an increasingly important identifier although take up in the music industry has been a little slow. ISNI is now liaising with the music industry to iron out any issues that have been identified and work to correct them and the indications are, once that happens, that there will be a strong push towards adopting ISNIs.”

  The benefit is that ISNIs can, in principle, “be used to identify the parties that perform the various roles that exist in the music industry, whether that is individual people, their stage personas, bands and orchestras, collaborations etc,” says Isherwood. ISNIs, he adds, are “name” identifiers not “person” identifiers. For example, the person know as Madonna has two ISNIs: One for “Madonna” (used as the artist) and another for “Madonna Louise Ciccone” (used as the composer/lyricists).

  The model for Quansic is to put ISNI at the heart of the data and aggregate around ISNIs all the various data sets. Nuttall's ambition is to connect ISNIs with all other identifiers and map as accurately as possible the links between identifiers. The starting point is the ISNI database and then enrich at all times, he explains, using other databases and checking.

  Quansic has partnerships with ISNI and the Recording Industry Association of America as an ISRC registration agency and a licensing agreement with YouTube. Its clients include DDEX, rights organisations PPL and PRS for Music in the UK, Amazon Music and Warner Music Group among others.

  At this stage, Nuttall says that Quansic's ISNI-X database is the largest artist data set with 1.2 million artists documented  and 1.5 million partially documented. Altogether, the database provides 150 million data points.

  Nuttall says he has worked on new working methodology, using the Graph software that allows to materialise all the links. The other aspect of the database is that entries in the database make it only if 100% of the identifiers are, well, identified. “We only work with 100% certainty,” says Nuttall. “Either we know or we don't. When we don't, we don't add. We've set the bar very high in terms of quality.”

Huge value for labels

  For Nuttall, 100% accuracy is paramount because the identification of artists is difficult with lots of artists with the same name. “There are a lot of errors, and it's not just long tail,” he adds.

  “Graph allows us to interconnect the works and we have all the connections, we can create info that was not available before,” he says. “We connect ISNI with ISRC and ISWC and we have an algorithm to reconstruct the link ISRC-ISWC. This is the Achilles heel of the music industry. ISRC is streamed and ISWC is paid and we trust the link, but most of the times it is very fragile. We can connect close to 100%. We have all the identifiers by platform, and we can connect all aspects. This can be of huge value added for labels.” 

  To beef up its organisation, Quansic acquired a few months ago Transparency Rights Management, the data matching company set up in 2010 by Jean-François Bert. “Transparency's team knows how to manage data,” says Nuttall. “Transparency brings a robust technical staff and will allow Quansic to grow fast. It's a perfect logistics fit. They have products and clients and we are integrating our technologies together.”

An interface between ISNI and the industry

  “We had co-created with FX an identifier and our first client was YouTube,” recalls Bert who has joined as COO of Quansic. “Being able to work with Quansic has allowed to have synergies with clients and also to acquire new technologies. FX is first and foremost an engineer, we did not master Graph and FX brought it to the fold. In addition, I have been working for 10 years on identifiers and here we have a company that puts transparency in metadata at the heart of its business. It was a very natural fit with FX. We have the same passion and the same modus operandi.”

  “We are the interface between ISNI and the music industry,” says Nuttall. “We adapted the data model to make it simple and usable. We are a short-cut for those who can adopt ISNI. The cost of cleaning data is huge around the world and here you have an ISNI identification database. It's done once and can be shared.”