Music ownership databases

Music industry, as a whole, has been trying to make a comprehensive data base last couple of years. In 2014, the Global Repertoire Database failed because PROs pulled out all their songs out of the database. Some PROs said that the database was too expensive, while other said that it would affect their business model too much. “The GRD was good in concept and extremely horrific in execution,” says one executive in the PRO camp. “If it continued further, it was going to become a Harvard study on wasting money” (). After this initiative collapse, the court case between Pandora, Sony and ASCAP became public knowledge. This year ASCAP and BMI how announced that they will team together to make a database the song in their catalogs. This only solves half the problem because this database would not cover songs not in catalogs. With major publishers like Sony, UMPG, and others pulling out their entire catalog ASCAP and BMI do to the court ruling on partial withdrawal there will be a major group of songs missing from this database. Everyone was surprised to find out soon after ASCAP’s and BMI’s announcement that RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and NMPA (National Music Publisher Association) were also working on a song database, and purposely excluded ASCAP and BMI. RIAA and NMPA insisted that the PROs had proven themselves on untrustworthy in developing a song database. While these groups have been trying to develop a song database this year, one other player has joined fray. Jim Sensenbrenner and Suzan Delbene, House Representatives, have announced that they are proposing a bill to make a government mandated song database (). This announcement has been met with mixed reviews because many in the music industry believe that the government is it already too involved in the industry. NMPA president David Israelite told Billboard, “It (song database) should be done in the private market, not by the government, and it should be done industry-wide, not in a fragmented way” (). In the last three years, the music industry has had one Industry-wide initiation to make a database collapse, two sets of organizations develop two different databases and had entire court case lose because major organization in the music industry refuse to release information in their organizations song database, but everyone says that they agree that there should be an industry wide database.