ASCAP and BMI unveil new joint database featuring information on 20m works

 By Emmanuel Legrand

US rights societies ASCAP and BMI have unveiled SONGVIEW, a new data platform that provides music users with "an authoritative view of copyright ownership and administration shares in the vast majority of music licensed in the United States."

  The data in SONGVIEW is free to the public to access on the two society's websites, and allows ASCAP and BMI to display detailed, aggregated and reconciled ownership data for performing rights for more than 20 million musical works in their combined repertoires. 

  Each entry includes a breakdown of shares controlled by ASCAP and BMI (and shares listed as Other, if applicable, since there are at least two other performance rights societies in this field: SESAC and Global Music Rights). 

A step towards more transparency

 
  Additional information featured in SONGVIEW includes: Songwriters and their affiliations, Publishers, Performers, alternate song titles, ISWC and IPI codes, BMI and ASCAP song IDs (if applicable), and publisher contact information.

  The project was one of the undertakings announced by the two societies as the Department of Justice (DoJ) launched a review process of the consent decrees that have ruled the two organisations for the past 70 years. 

  Interestingly, one of the first reactions to the launch of SONGVIEW came from the DoJ, which commended ASCAP and BMI for their initiative. “The Antitrust Division commends ASCAP and BMI’s innovative collaboration in creating and releasing SONGVIEW,” said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “While more work needs to be done to improve the transparency of copyright ownership in musical works, the creation of this free platform is a positive step towards doing so and, importantly, may help to promote competition in the music licensing industry to the benefit of music licensees, artists, and American consumers.” 

A convenient digital tool

  For ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews (pictured, below) this project will provide"greater transparency for everyone who relies on this copyright data to guide important business decisions. When you see the SONGVIEW checkmark, you know that the data is consistent in both ASCAP and BMI’s copyright systems." Matthews added that SONGVIEW is "a convenient new digital tool for anyone who licenses music."

  “When two companies that are fierce competitors come together on a project this ambitious to address a need identified by the marketplace, it says a lot about how important greater data transparency is to both of our organisations," explained BMI President and CEO Mike O’Neill (pictured, below), for whom the launch is "a good first step in the ongoing evolution of transparent and accessible data, and I am pleased with what we have accomplished so far to meet the evolving needs of the music industry."

  The SONGVIEW engine was built from the ground up by the two performing rights societies by a cross-functional team of copyright, technical, distribution and product experts. The two societies explained that tens of thousands of development hours went into the project, in particular to build an entirely new reconciliation system, which could ingest data from over 20 million musical works. 

A process to reconcile data

  The process is the following: the system ingests song ownership information from both BMI and ASCAP, processes and reconciles that information based on agreed-upon rules, and then sends the reconciled data back out to BMI and ASCAP’s public, searchable databases. Reconciled songs appear with a green checkmark to indicate that ASCAP and BMI "agree on the information and have the same data in each of their respective systems." 

  A work is considered to be reconciled when ASCAP and BMI have identical information regarding the writers and publishers of the work, including the shares belonging to each of those writers and publishers. In addition, a work will only be considered reconciled if the total shares on the work equal 100%. ASCAP and BMI said that currently background music and cues for film and television, which have a different registration process, are not currently included in SONGVIEW. Fully reconciled data will be added to the database as it becomes available.