Michael Huppe at A2IM's Indie Week: 'SoundExchange has the best ISRC database in the world'

By Emmanuel Legrand

SoundExchange CEO Michael Huppe addressed the issue of data in the music industry in a fireside chat with Max Willens of Digiday during A2IM's Indie Week. 

  He noted that the music industry was built previously around the sales model, and for decades a lot of infrastructure based around this model. But with the changes in the past decades and the now dominance of the access model, the industry needs to build up its infrastructure to match the needs created by the digital era.    

  "The industry used to change decade by decade and now seems to change by the week," said Huppe. "A lot of the systems and organsations are build around a model that rapidly becomes irrelevant. It is important that the industry moves quickly and modernises."  

Uniquely situated

  He reminded that in the wake of 1998's DMCA, Soundexchange was "built to do this" since it was created in the digital space to help manage the digital streaming world that existed around 2003-2005. Almost two decades later, SoundExchange is "uniquely situated" because it has connections with performers and labels as well as with over 3,500 platforms.

  Washington, DC-based SoundExchange, he said, is at the intersection of music and data and has the opportunity to make thing better. "Out of the gate, we were very tech forward," he remembered, saying that SoundExchange moved to the cloud before it was prevalent, for example, or the use of open source software.     

  Identifying ownership of sound recordings is paramount, he said, and making sure that the data is properly entered will help limit problems downstream. The issue is twofold, one is to ensure the data about the sound recordings (ISRC) and compositions (ISWC) is correct; the other is to match the right ISRCs with the right ISWCs. 

The oil in the engine

  To that effect, Huppe claimed that Sound Exchange has "the best ISRC database in the world."  

  "We created MDX [Music Data Exchange, an application to facilitate the exchange of sound recording and publishing data] to allow a lot of ownership to be affirmed before it is released, so you don't have a problem downstream," he explained.  

  "Metadata around ownership of songs is not the sexy part but it is the oil in the engine," he said. "When there is a payment you should know where that money should go."