Music 2025 – The Music Data Dilemma: Issues Facing the Music Industry in Improving Data Management

Abstract

The Intellectual Property framework is a crucial underpinning factor in the success of the UK’s creative industries. It provides rights owners and holders with the tools to promote and distribute creative content to the public and to receive remuneration and attribution in return. However, the advent of streaming and online distribution has posed a significant challenge for the management of repertoire and content attribution. This is due to unprecedented volumes of data being generated, divergent velocities across the data flow, exponential increases in the variety of data sources, a lack of confidence in the veracity of the information and difficulties with access. Additionally, inherited frameworks, which remain the backbone of the system, and which evolved to ensure that rights holders are effectively, efficiently and transparently remunerated, have increasingly been threatened by a range of competing, proprietary data protocols, introduced through disruptive innovation. Across the ecosystem as a whole, a divergence of standards has compounded problems. This multi-layered fragmentation of metadata and a preference for proprietary walled data silos, have inevitably undermined cross-system interoperability. These issues, and in particular their effects on the music industry, were pointed out in the Bazalgette Independent Review of the Creative Industries.