Driven by data
PPL’s Repertoire Database now holds details of approximately 24 million recordings, with over 45,000 being added each week on average. We are constantly striving to be leaders in music data management, working on internal and cross-industry initiatives that help to maximise our members’ income, as well as improve the quality and accuracy of data across the recorded music ecosystem.
Streamlining internal processes to maximise member payments
At the start of 2022, our new technology tool, Usage Hub, went live. This standardises and automates the pre-processing of data relating to the use of recorded music received from commercial radio stations, public performance licensees, CMOs and Business Services clients. Usage Hub is built on the latest cloud technologies, improving the efficiency and accuracy of payments to our members.
Collaborations to improve data quality industry-wide
As more solutions come to market which allow for recording line-up data to be captured directly in the studio, we have worked to ensure that these apps can access the PPL member portal to retrieve and add International Performer Numbers (IPNs) at point of recording. This significantly improves the usefulness of the data when it flows through to record companies, and ultimately into our repertoire database. These include Session, VEVA Sound, Sound Credit and Creative Passport.
Data cleansing through digital fingerprinting
To augment in-house work done on grouping multiple versions of recordings together to drive consistent performer line-ups, we trialled the use of digital fingerprinting with Gracenote. Their leading technology in music recognition is enabling us to de-duplicate recording data submitted by recording rightsholders, driving even greater accuracy in our dataset. Following the trial, we signed a contract with Gracenote at the end of 2022 to provide audio recognition data for PPL as part of several usage, matching, and roll-up projects in 2023.