A group representing musical copyright organizations from a dozen countries has launched a new international registry of song titles called WorksNet. The database - which, according to plans, will eventually hold tens of billions of titles - will simplify the tracking of royalty information across borders as the music business becomes increasingly international and digital.
"We want to be able to identify and track musical works in all these new media, and to do it automatically, digitally, and in a way that's transparent as far as culture and language," says Robbin Ahrold, BMI's representative on the committee. The current system, in which each copyright organization keeps its own records with its own standards, "simply won't work in that environment."
Under the new common standard, each song in the catalog of any of the member groups will have its own identifying number. Eventually, registry members hope each digital copy of a song will carry this marker, so that any time a song is played - whether on radio, movie soundtracks, or the Internet - its use can be automatically tracked and billed. Currently, the MP4 compression format is being developed with fields that will carry these numbers.
Thus the group is essentially setting the standards to be used when music delivery is mostly digital. But Ahrold sees advantages even in an analog world. Efficiency of cataloging and retrieving rights records will be increased when a song can be placed in one database instead of hundreds. Accuracy of accounting will also be enhanced when distinct songs that share a title (Ahrold cites the 300-plus ASCAP/BMI entries for "Baby, Baby") or have been recorded by several artists, can be tracked under one number.
Now that standards have been established and a server set up at ASCAP's office in New York, Ahrold foresees that titles will begin loading in August, with 2 million songs from both the US and other countries to be installed by late fall. The system is currently set up to track performance rights, but it is said to be easily adaptable to reproduction rights and even the rights for digitized audio/visual and graphics works.
David Given, a San Francisco musical-copyright lawyer, is somewhat skeptical about both the long- and short-term promise of the new system. Centralized tracking, he says, won't solve the most contentious rights problem of Internet delivery - that is, whether royalties are due to the holders of broadcast or reproduction rights.
For the time being, Given says that record companies, music publishers, and other rights proctors already have such elaborate tracking software and international presence that not much information is falling through the cracks. "I don't see a lot of substantive change in the way artists are paid for their work," he says.
Even Ahrold concedes, "I don't want to create the sense that there's going to be a huge jump in royalty payments. It will just let us do what we do much more efficiently."
