News

Last month, SGAE had the great opportunity to invite in its Madrid premises, through its think tank, Instituto Autor, Pr. Silke Von Lewinski, Director of the International Department of the Max Planck Institute (Munich).  After the Master Class, Adriana Moscoso, coordinator of the Instituto Autor, interviewed Mrs. Lewinski about her views on the EU actuality, and in particular the EU proposal on collective management.  Mrs. Lewinski insists in particular on the social and cultural role of collective management societies and on their importance to guarantee cultural diversity in Europe.

You can view the whole video here

Today, during the Creators’ Conference ECSA – the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance – issued a very important declaration stating their continued support for the exclusive assignment of performing rights to author societies. They highlighted the various benefits this ensures, namely:

• Equal treatment and certainty of repertoire
• Transparency and certainty for creators

You can read the full declaration here.

The Finnish performing rights organization Teosto and Spanish music technology company BMAT carried out a pioneering research pilot in June 2012, applying BMAT’s music identification technology for the automated reporting of musical works performed at a live music event. BMAT’s technology was put to the test in a real life festival setting, to provide input for a new live music reporting concept currently being developed at Teosto.

The pilot was carried out with three Finnish bands (Nightwish, PMMP and Notkea Rotta) at Provinssirock, one of Finland’s largest rock festivals. The shows were recorded, analysed by BMAT and the results were evaluated by Teosto.

Live music – a challenging environment

While automated music broadcast monitoring for online, radio and TV is already an established market, the automated identification of musical works performed at live shows remains a technological challenge. Changes in tempo, key, instrumentation and song structure, together with audience sounds and the acoustic characteristics of a live venue, make it difficult to accurately match a live version to a studio recording of the same song The piloted technology compares the live audio to a reference set of studio recordings and provides a list of matching song pairs.

Positive results

The results of the technology pilot were promising: the piloted technology provided very good results for two out of the three pilot shows, and worked especially well for works in the mainstream pop/rock genre. While certain limitations remain, it is likely that music identification technologies can in the near future provide a reliable way for music copyright organizations and other music industry players to detect and verify setlist data from live music events.

“Emerging music identification technologies for the live music market should benefit music authors by enabling an automated, cost-effective and fast performance royalty distribution process.Teosto wants to be at the forefront tackling the technological challenges of music rights administration for the future, and these types of state of the art technologies are one part of the solution.”

Katri Sipilä, CEO, Teosto

“At BMAT, we are committed to constantly improve the reach and quality of our monitoring services, building on our tradition and expertise of tracking commercial and production music across terrestrial broadcasts and digital streams worldwide. 

In the midst of expanding our monitoring solutions into other environments, our partner Teosto came to us with a live music identification project and we loved it. Listening to the needs of our clients and giving support where it matters most lies at the core of our company values. We are very proud to work with Teosto, with whom we share the vision of new royalty distribution methods.”
Alex Loscos, CEO of BMAT