The music industry took a long time to embrace digital, but now paid subscription services are its largest drive of growth. RIAA reports that the revenue from paid subscription services in the US grew to $5.5 billion in 2023, making up 84% of the total recorded music revenue.
The value of broadening investments in data strategies and operations is apparent throughout the industry. Sony recently appointed its first-ever executive vice president of AI to guide the implementation of such incentives, a move that underscores their significance for the future of the industry. However, while virtually everyone in the music industry agrees that it is essential to have an effective data strategy in place, many businesses have yet to achieve this goal. It remains common for companies to be running disparate systems that do not communicate easily with each other, resulting in massive inefficiencies, incorrect data, and a reduced ability to extract valuable information from the data being collected to apply the available insights and opportunities to their full advantage.
In the digital realm, music is data. And in the streaming ecosystem, data about music is the most valuable resource available to musicians, labels, streaming services, and other digital service providers (DSP). While this data can be approached from several different angles and classified into various categories, this paper will consider the following specific business data types.
1. Repertoire data includes information about songs, sound recordings and releases, data about songwriters, composers, and artists, and details about music publishers and copyright ownership. In the recorded music segment, it is sometimes also called «label copy.»
2. Transactional data covers music consumption and consumer behavior, sales reporting and royalty distribution, and more. The plethora of data received from DSPs goes far beyond the number of downloads and streams.
3. Metadata is a specialized data set required to facilitate communication between repertoire and transactional data, which can be defined as data about the data.
Building efficient real-time data pipelines for music companies typically requires the identification of correlations between the repertoire the company manages and its performance. To establish these connections, one must somehow integrate a range of incompatible systems to enable them to communicate with each other. Without this communication, the digital music supply chain cannot operate successfully.
In this paper, we focus on software engineering components involved in developing comprehensive and effective real-time data pipelines and scalable data streaming architecture, to better equip music industry players with the knowledge they need to work more collaboratively and more efficiently and to choose the right tech partners to achieve their goals.
CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Data Types and Data Management Approaches
- Repertoire Delivery to Digital Music Supply Chain with DDEX
- Building a Transactional Data Pipeline
- Conclusion
