Project

Driven by digitalization, the exploitation of musical works is becoming increasingly global, resulting in great economic potential. This applies not only to performing artists, but also to authors and music publishers, who collect royalties for the performance, broadcasting and reproduction of compositions. In addition to extended access to a global market, digitalization offers potential for improvement in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

National music publishers generate international revenues primarily through two channels:

1. royalties collected by foreign collecting societies and forwarded to the national collecting society (e.g. GEMA) or
2. royalties collected by foreign sub-publishing partners.

Drawbacks of both cases are delays between one and four years, loss of revenue due to defective and incomplete data sets, administrative friction losses and direct costs for intermediary functions.

The project aims at developing a conceptual approach of a software system to interact with the various collecting societies, initially focusing the European region. This software system should provide a uniform and easy access to various common functionalities in the interaction with collecting societies, avoiding complex and laborious interactions with each of the various collecting societies and abstracting their individual requirements.

With IT-support providing a standardized and widely automated way of international exploitation of authors' rights, the financial and artistic independence of authors and music publishers can be ensured.