Muserk’s Blue Matter Delivers Upgrade to Rights Management
Ever since the Napster fiasco of the early aughts and the subsequent leap from physical to digital music, the music industry has been stuck playing catch-up–scrambling to track and streamline the flow of royalties back to artists.
Although the widely-used system for collecting royalties remains an antiquated process, international rights management company Muserk has a secret weapon: Blue Matter, an end-to-end solution capable of matching today’s modern technology standards.
Traditionally, publishers and publishing administrators have had teams of people who were responsible for each step of the rights management process–copyright ingestion, copyright discovery & matching, data delivery to platforms, rights management, royalty ingestion & accounting, and royalty distribution. In 2017, Muserk set out on a mission to automate the operational tasks that dominate rights management. The result: a scalable, patented system enabling all copyrights to start earning faster, start earning more, and be paid to their owners sooner.
“We spent the first two or three years just hacking,” says Muserk’s Head of Technology, Collin White. “With Muserk’s client roster quickly growing, we knew we needed a scalable solution. We wanted to automate each step of the rights management flow so that the professionals could focus on the creative and revenue-generating aspects of the business.”
Blue Matter reduces bottlenecks in various stages of a copyright’s lifecycle, beginning with rapid ingestion on a massive scale. Using a combination of proprietary formats and industry standards, Blue Matter automatically checks for common data problems within incoming copyright data and segments errored copyrights out of the ingestion process. This allows “good” copyrights to make it into the automated system and queues up “bad” copyrights for rights managers at Muserk to rectify with the copyright owner.
Once copyright data has been received, it is passed on to Muserk’s proprietary matching algorithms and analysis tool, MMatch. Many international CMOs are government-run entities with limited resources and varying tech capabilities so tagging can vary quite a bit. Blue Matter’s AI is trained on tens of millions of lines of copyright data from over 40 countries as well as Muserk’s proprietary algorithm, allowing it to identify and validate potential matches. The automation of this process means that rights managers can begin the discovery of copyrights-related assets as soon as data is received, reducing common bottlenecks.
Royalty ingestion and accounting can also be processed rapidly on a massive scale. Blue Matter processes royalty files ranging from 10 to 100 million lines in a matter of minutes–automatically applying complex contract terms and royalty splits across each individual line of data.
“In traditional rights management, analyzing and ingesting works is performed by a team, discovery of digital assets is performed by a team, active rights management is performed by a team, and royalty analysis & distribution is performed by a team,” says Paul Goldman, Founder and CEO of Muserk. “Blue Matter enables one team to perform all of these tasks at a massive scale, many of them simultaneously, so copyright owners are paid faster.”
