Overview

For nearly a decade, Music Reports has been the market leader in strategic consulting, copyright research, licensing and royalty accounting on behalf of the world´s most significant Digital Media brands. Music Reports has built and refined processes that offer the industry´s most robust licensing and administration services offering clients speed to market, combined with unsurpassed scale in catalog licensing. With the development of an enterprise-level technical infrastructure, and the legal copyright expertise and qualifications to analyze and recommend strategic licensing directions, Music Reports is uniquely positioned to undertake the mass research, licensing, and reporting initiatives required in today´s digital market.

Music Reports offers Digital Media clients an array of Strategic Consulting services that include Legal Consulting on new business models to understand rights implications and opportunities, Business Consulting, to determine the most cost effective means of licensing, and Market Analysis, to evaluate and optimize a client´s current licensing strategy.

Music Reports has developed robust automated and manual processes to serve client Copyright Research needs in the Digital Media sector. Leveraging the power of Songdex®, Music Reports is able to import and normalize client data and use sophisticated algorithms to determine known copyright matches. To support low-match or unmatched content, songs are moved into a hierarchical queue staffed by a team of more than 20 employees where copyrights are researched using systemic manual matching processes.

Music Reports recently launched an innovative Digital Media reporting platform, enabling thousands of music publishers to access aggregate Digital Media revenue and usage reporting.

Overview

Music Reports has developed extensive systems to support the unique challenges of content licensing and administration in the mobile environment. Mobile clients rely on Music Reports for sophisticated research processes and opportunities for cost streamlining pursuant to a catalog matching and evaluation. Music Reports performs ongoing systemic copyright research into ringtone and ringback rights ownership, to support evolving mobile catalog requirements. The company has built processes to normalize the varied and complex data sources unique to the mobile sector, reporting and accounting to rights owners on the consumption of all mobile assets, including wallpaper and games through multiple carriers.

Music Reports has successfully solved legal and business challenges for Mobile Devices and Carriers through numerous Strategic Consulting initiatives. Clients seeking the validation of an existing business model, or the exploration of a potential business model use Music Reports as a trusted source to determine licensing needs and to optimize licensing processes. Music Reports´ breadth and depth of experience is unparalleled in performance, master, mechanical and synchronization licensing and Copyright Research.

Overview

Music Reports is the largest independent administrator of music rights in the television industry. While broadcasters may elect to undertake blanket licenses with performing rights organizations, such as ASCAP and BMI, Music Reports licenses and administers on behalf of hundreds of television stations who benefit from the reduced cost of Per Program Licensing. Using proprietary data systems and automated report preparation, Music Reports routinely processes over 225,000 program cue sheets per quarter. Music Reports calculates license fees, resolves license disputes and issues automated reports to rightsholders in a model that is optimally efficient for the broadcaster and copyright owner. Music Reports represents the majority of Per Program licensed stations including outlets owned by NBC, ABC, CBS, Hearst Argyle and Gannett.

Music Reports´ years of copyright experience provides clients with market-relevant legal and business consulting. Music Reports is continually engaged in complex short term and ongoing research projects on behalf of broadcasters to determine content ownership, analyze content market share and provide quantitative data in licensing negotiations.

Overview

In addition to providing music licensing and reporting services for networks such as QVC and HSN, Music Reports has developed key initiatives to enable cost streamlining for its clients in Cable and Satellite. Music Reports uses its proprietary database, Songdex®, and downstream applications to provide both general ownership and quantitative licensing data.

Music Reports has built proprietary portals to allow a client the ability to review music rights and availability tied to specific contract terms. Music Reports routinely performs strategic analysis and research for clients to evaluate licensing options aimed at reducing a client´s operational costs.

Music Reports offers an array of consulting services for Business models and Strategic licensing opportunities for Cable and Satellite broadcasters and Satellite-delivered background music services. Services include a review of licensing protocols and an analysis of contractual costs as determined by a client´s content agreements, the development of forward licensing strategies, deal structures and deal templates.

Overview

Consumer Products companies rely on Music Reports to navigate the varied rights associated with music licensing for their unique and differentiated offerings. Music Reports supports the high volume copyright usage of its Consumer Products clients with automated and manual Copyright Research backed by dedicated large-scale accounting and fee settlement processes. Consumer Products content usage varies significantly, with specific products requiring a deep library of content, resulting in a complex ownership and reporting process. Alternatively, a product may only use a single song, with a single copyright owner. Process and systems flexibility enables Music Reports to efficiently support either content scenario. Music Reports is unique in its ability to handle these extremes of scale, in conjunction with a breadth and depth of expertise in applicable rights.

Music Reports offers Copyright, Legal, and Product Strategy consulting to a number of clients in the Consumer Products business. In addition to reviewing any existing licenses held by a client, Music Reports offers master and publishing rights clearance, creative music supervision, and an evaluation of synchronization rights implications. Music Reports has advised Consumer Products clients on IP rights, trademark and agreement scope and structure. This enables a Music Reports client to launch innovative products with the certainty of coverage under the appropriate licensing.

Overview

Music Reports´ expertise in the legal and business aspects of copyright administration has established the company as a trusted consulting resource for labels and content distributors. Music Reports provides content owners with strategic direction on diverse aspects of copyright management, and business operations including licensing, royalty reporting, and problem resolution.

Content owners utilize Music Reports´ proprietary database and evolved processes to determine copyright ownership and payee information in large volume attribution projects. In addition, Music Reports is retained to support ongoing research efforts on behalf of content distributors. These services include master, performance, synchronization and mechanical licensing, across online, mobile, broadcast and consumer products sectors.

Music Reports performs regular project-based and ongoing Licensing & Administration services for record companies and content distributors. Labels retain Music Reports to solve complex royalty problems, where their own data is insufficient to clarify attribution on musical works. Music Reports is uniquely able to normalize high volume usage data from various sources and reconcile the usage against works in Songdex®. Music Reports can then merge the usage with stored relevant payee information and distribute royalties to the appropriate copyright holders.

News and Events

Case Studies

Digital Media Client. A Digital Media Client required a copyright research initiative to be undertaken prior to launching a new service, and requested daily updates of new copyrights as they are cleared. Using the process outlined above, Music Reports was able to match the content in a client´s database and systemically license a baseline catalog. Ongoing new content updates are fed to Music Reports from the client and matched using algorithms established in Songdex®, with unmatched or inconclusive matches placed in a hierarchical manual research queue for further determination of ownership. In order to mitigate any lag between licensing and go-live, a daily update of newly matched and licenses content is fed back to the Digital Media client, allowing them the ability to immediately activate rights for the content´s usage in their service.

Case Studies

Diversified Media Company. A Fortune 500 Media Company engaged Music Reports to support its wireless content initiatives on multiple levels. Music Reports initiated and maintained a voluntary publisher licensing program for ringtones. Music Reports built a custom contract management tool and interface, allowing company employees, or authorized third parties, to log-in and enter or update licensing rules and manage available rights and terms on any of the client´s content assets. Next, Music Reports imported sales data on all asset types from more than 50 global carriers. The data was normalized and reconciled with the rules input by the licensing team, prior to calculating royalties due. Lastly, Music Reports paid the royalties due to the respective rightsholders. The broad scope of the initiative, in conjunction with Music Reports´ expertise in licensing, and data processing, allowed the client to successfully outsource functions that exceeded the capacity and skill set of their organization.

Verizon. Verizon, a leading mobile provider, engaged Music Reports in an ongoing Data Analysis initiative. In addition to reviewing the service, determining what licenses were required, and where to obtain those licenses, Music Reports reviewed opportunities for systemic licensing processes to reduce Verizon´s operational costs. Music Reports also consults on timely initiatives such as mastertones, ringtones, ringbacks and in master and publishing licensing.

Case Studies

The Oprah Winfrey Show. Music Reports saw an opportunity to improve upon the entire royalty distribution process by brokering the performance rights to the music used in The Oprah Winfrey Show. During negotiations, it became clear that a deal could be structured that unlocked considerable value for both sides. Music Reports became the exclusive source licensor of the performance rights to the recurring music in the show. Rights were then sublicensed to television stations in exchange for license fees. Music Reports collects these license fees from the stations and distributes them, along with detailed accounting statements, directly to the producer, the composers and other rights holders.

Through this process, Music Reports has helped television stations significantly reduce payments for the music in the show, while at the same time increasing the revenue collected by the producer and various music rights holders. Further, the systems developed to administer this license have improved upon the accuracy, transparency and timeliness of the entire royalty distribution process. Music Reports has administered the Oprah Source License for over 10 years.

The Radio Music Licensing Committee. The Radio Music Licensing Committee (RMLC) represents approximately 10,000 radio stations for the purpose of negotiating domestic performing rights licenses. The RMLC retained Music Reports to provide quantitative data to support a specific negotiation. In order to obtain a statistical sample for analysis, the RMLC provided Music Reports with approximately 25% of the airplay data from its represented stations, or roughly 35 million plays, for the period of June 2 - August 30, 2008. Leveraging Songdex® and Music Reports´ advanced systemic algorithms, 87.65% of all plays were successfully matched, equating to some 31 million plays. In undertaking this, it was discovered that 31 international Performing Rights Organizations (PROs) were represented in the airplay sample, and the domestic PROs represented 97.35% of the identified plays.

Case Studies

MTV Networks. MTV Networks, a division of Viacom that oversees cable and internet brands such as MTV and VH1 retained Music Reports to evaluate the feasibility and financial ramifications of MTV Network´s implementation of a Per Program license with ASCAP and BMI Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. To develop the model, Music Reports used proprietary systems to integrate program schedules, ratings data and music cue sheets for thousands of broadcasts. Music Reports provided MTV Network with short- and long-term strategies on how to maximize savings under a Per Program license, including advice on how to structure composer contracts.

DMX. DMX, a satellite-distributed background music service, required that Music Reports assist in licensing with a specified list of music publishers, and develop a proprietary administration application for monitoring licensing. Music Reports negotiated changes to existing agreements, resulting in securing full catalog rights on behalf of DMX, thereby expanding the breadth of content available to the client´s programmers. Music Reports developed a custom contract management portal for DMX in which fully executed contracts are implemented into a proprietary licensing application. Monthly status reports are created in the portal to update stakeholders on licensing progress. The client now has a higher degree of visibility into their licensing, and a more robust content library for their service.

Case Studies

SanDisk. SanDisk, a maker of portable storage media, engaged Music Reports to research copyright ownership for content in its Slotdisk initiative. Music Reports successfully researched the copyright ownership of SanDisk´s prospective content, and further, executed voluntary licenses with publishers to enable the client to meet their production and launch timelines. This undertaking required Music Reports to efficiently interface with third parties working on respective elements of the product, as well as SanDisk´s internal team, adding a secondary layer of operational complexity to the process.

American Greetings. American Greetings, the world´s largest publicly owned creator, manufacturer and distributor of social expression products, uses Music Reports to license and administer content approvals for its line of musical cards. This required licensing a large volume of individual song approvals at both the publisher and master recording level. Where obtainable, Music Reports was required to negotiate exclusive deals on behalf of their client. International exchange rates and varying mechanical rights societies rates had to be taken into account during the licensing and ongoing administration processes. Due to the unique product requirements, this project is managed by the manual licensing team at Music Reports, with administrative data supplied by Songdex®.

Case Studies

Record Label. A major label retained Music Reports to resolve royalties due to rightsholders as a result of content used with pass-through mechanical licenses. The label´s internal data was insufficient to establish the appropriate payees, ownership splits of the recordings and contact information for the rightsholders. Music Reports was able to process the disparate data sources and normalize the data. The amount of usage was determined for each of the recordings, corresponding to the available usage types. Music Reports tied the usage to the appropriate payees, according to the data in Songdex®. Music Reports was then able to summarize the amounts owing to each rightsholder, report on the amounts to the label, and complete the project by paying the outstanding sums to each payee. Music Reports´ proprietary database and accounting systems were essential to the completion of this label project.

Record Label. A major independent label required Music Reports to clear all music publishing licenses for their catalog for mobile distribution. The content would be distributed internationally, through more than 50 carrier networks. In some cases, carriers had pre-existing performance licenses. Music Reports reviewed the content agreements to advise the label on content coverage under the respective licenses. Next, Music Reports secured the appropriate licenses for the label to extend the opportunity for monetizing their catalog. Lastly, the agreements were aligned with the content usage and subsequent carrier data, resolving the issue for the client.