Eamonn Forde Meets… – each month, the veteran music business journalist speaks to a senior industry figure about the topics that really matter – and gets the opinions of the people who make the decisions that count.
August 2024: Rob Wells, CEO of Orfium. He discusses the “creeping issue” of broken data, how a fix today does not always ward off a problem tomorrow, why major labels investing in data solutions themselves is too much of a heavy lift and how the internationalisation of the music business is only going to make finding data integrity solutions even more pressing.
The integrity imbroglio: metadata is still letting the music business down badly. This is not news. But fixes are coming, although the combination of smart tech and reinforcement learning from human feedback still needs a decade to sort everything out.
As president of global digital business at Universal Music Group between 2010 and 2015, Rob Wells was right in the front row as the record business shifted from ownership to access and, after years of straight decline from 2000, started to move into the recovery position. He was one of the architects of the digital music business as we understand it today.
After a short – and, let’s say, turbulent – stint as CCO and CEO the Americas at Crowdmix, he became CEO at music rights management software company Orfium in early 2018. “Music, data, rights. Managed right.” That is its marketing tagline. “Orfium,” the company boasts, is “solving the entertainment industry’s biggest challenges” – which is to say: digital music and broadcast rights management, cue sheets, data, and reporting.
The whole enterprise runs on data. Yet music data, especially in an age of billions and trillions of lines of micropayments, has been a snowballing problem for the music business. Incomplete. Wrong. In conflict. None of this is news, of course, but the kicker is that conversations about this in 2024 are exactly the same as conversations about it in 1999. Wheels eternally spinning in mud.
A legacy of old data
The industry does not just have a data problem, says Wells by way of understanding this: it has a data integrity problem.
“You still have this legacy of old data and it’s a mission to correct it,” he says of incomplete data being input around some creations at both the publisher and the label level. In the digital age, metadata is far more complex than just listing who should get paid what; it spirals into things like genre, tempo, mood and more that other (external) services rely on to run to full capability.
“It’s a catch-up process,” he says. “That is not because anyone’s failed. But the consumption side of the industry has evolved so fast yet everything else, the infrastructure of the industry, hasn’t moved anywhere near as quickly.”
The industry does not just have a data problem, says Wells… it has a data integrity problem.
With all the stakeholders (labels, publishers, services, PROs) existing cheek by jowl in a state of tense interdependence, each one can unintentionally cause things to start to fall apart in terms of data and where songs collapse into conflict and money is held (indefinitely) in escrow.
“Most of the time it’s a data issue problem,” argues Wells. “It could have been carried over from other platforms. It could be something that a publisher has done or something a society has done. Sometimes, it’s even the platform that has overwritten data because of an update and it’s thrown a bunch of assets into conflict.”
Is a data utopia possible?
But a fix today does not mean a data utopia tomorrow. Problems can, and will, return.
“None of this is fire and forget,” he says. “It’s not like you solve the problem and walk away, leave that alone and that’s going to generate money ad infinitum. You have to monitor that because, pretty soon after an asset is fixed, it can go straight back into conflict because someone has written it to put it back the way it was as that was what they thought was the right thing. This isn’t anybody’s fault. This is just the nature of the game at the moment.”
Orfium and other third-party operations in a similar space, such as Mogul, Trqk and RoyaltyTracks, are positioning themselves as the tech membrane that can heal these data issues for rightsowners and collection societies, finding previously lost revenues. Naturally, Wells will argue for the importance of an external company like Orfium, like a music data spin on the Mandy Rice-Davis quote during the Profumo scandal: the major labels could build their own solution but they either do not want to or cannot. It is, he proposes, too much of a “heavy lift” for them to do so.
“The technology that’s needed to track this accurately, or fix the problems of data integrity, is not readily available for major rights owners, or even major societies,” he insists. “It’s not really available for major rights owners because it’s expensive to build. And they have their own business to worry about rather than spending millions of dollars on building tech. Collecting societies are more or less exclusively nonprofits. So any money they invest in tech is coming out of their members’ pockets. It’s a conflict.”
Groundhog Data
The sheer scale of the investment here precludes many in the music business from building their own solutions and platforms. It all, says Wells, requires “petabytes of data” and “an army of labourers” to manually fix data problems. It all hinges on reinforcement learning from human feedback: the human and the machine pulling together.
Especially with the explosion of UGC (first on YouTube, now on TikTok), this data integrity issue has grown by stealth. “It’s been a creeping issue,” says Wells. This will only become a bigger and bigger concern and the music industry truly globalises and more and more markets (and not just in Africa, India and Latin America) shape the international music business.
“Look at burgeoning A&R territories and music coming out of certain territories, especially when you fold in language issues, it’s going to be a problem,” he warns. “Everyone is looking at Japan and how J-Pop is going to be booming over the next two or three years. But the Japanese industry has never really crossed the Rubicon when it comes to digital as 65% of the music there is still consumed on physical carriers. Are they ready for this? I think the majors and the big Japanese independents are, but there are definitely going to be some problems.”
Everyone, he says, knows what the complications are and how they are only going to get worse. Solutions are coming, but do not expect them to be instant.
“We’re probably ten years away from an industry-wide fix where markets, whether it’s African markets, Latin American markets or Southeast Asian markets, can actually tap into a platform like this,” he predicts.
But facing it all down has to be a pan-industry focus. Lacklustre data integrity is both a financial and a moral concern. “This side of the business is not going anywhere, other than growing,” he says. “If you’re not delivering your information correctly, you’re underserving your constituents.”
It will not forever be Groundhog Day (or, rather, Groundhog Data); but get used to, for a decade at least, the ambient sound of wheels spinning in mud.
