Music Case: Global Repertoire Database

Music case: Global repertoire Database

With the increase in digital music downloads and streaming and other cross-border sales, it has become apparent that the music industry would benefit from having a single, authoriative source of information on multi-market rights ownership and licensing contact information.

The issue is anything but academic: performing rights revenue - which relies on transparent rights ownership accounts for an ever increasing share of the music industry's revenue. In the UK, PRS For Music has doubled its revenues from overseas since 2004. (Source: A Year of Innovation, Licensing Works: a Report by the music industry, UK Music).

Step forward, the Global Repertoire Database, which aims to create a single, industry standard database with a global view of rights ownership for the world's musical woks.

This ambitious project, due to go live in 2015, has selected London as its headquarters, with Berlin as its operations centre.

When completed, the main benefits of the GRD will be to create a new and more effective global infrastructure for music rights management, leading to an improved path to music licensing for digital and other music services, and to efficiency benefits for the whole music ecosystem saving extensive costs currently lost to duplication in data processing.

Andrew Jenkins, Chair of the Board of Directors of ICMP, the International Confederation of Music Publishers, said,

‘The decision to locate the Global Repertoire Database in two world capital cities, London and Berlin, was taken after a detailed selection process by the GRD working group, facilitated by our business partner, Deloitte.

‘Potential locations were assessed and analysed over a long number of months and the decision was not at all easy as some excellent candidate cities were under consideration. Availability of suitably skilled staff, accessibility for global industry participants, and strength of legal protection for intellectual property were important criteria and of course the global nature and requirements of the GRD is a key consideration.’

http://www.globalrepertoiredatabase.com/