INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Exactuals, a software service offering payments management for the music industry, is debutingR.AI, a new tool that it dubbed the &Palantir
for music.& It a service that can track songwriting information and rights across different platforms to ensure attribution for music
distributors.
As companies like Apple and Spotify demand better information from labels about the songs they&re pushing to streaming
services, companies are scrambling to clean up their data and provide proper attribution.
According to Exactuals, that where the R.AI
service comes in.
The company is tracking 59 million songs for their &Interested Party Identifiers& (IPIs), International Standard Work
Codes (ISWCs) and International Standard Recording Codes (ISRCs) — all of which are vital to ensuring that songwriters and musicians are
properly paid for their work every time a song is streamed, downloaded, covered or viewed on a distribution platform.
Chris McMurtry, the
head of music product at Exactuals, explained it like this: In the music business, songwriters have the equivalent of a social security
number, which is attached to any song they write so they can receive credit and payment
Performers of songs have their own identifier, which is the ISWC
Then the song itself gets its own code, called the ISRC which is used to track a song as it performed by other artists through various
covers, samples and remixes.
&There only one ISWC, but there might be 300 ISRCs,& says Exactuals chief executive, Mike Hurst.
Publishing
technology companies will pay writers and performers based on these identifiers, but they&re struggling to identify and track all of the
700,000 disparate places where the data could be, says McMurtry
Hence the need for R.AI.
The technology is &an open API based on machine learning that matches disparate data sources to clean and enhance
it so rights holders can get paid and attribution happens,& says McMurry.
For publishers, Exactuals argues that R.AI is the best way to
track rights across a huge catalog of music, and for labels it an easy way to provide services like Apple and Spotify with the information
they&re now demanding, Hurst said.
