Music rights data errors can reduce royalty revenue without being immediately visible even at companies with sophisticated systems and long-standing relationships with collective management organizations (CMOs), according to QwantumRights Solutions, a firm whose CEO Eric Baptiste previously led Canada’s Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN).
Receiving regular royalty statements does not mean the underlying data is complete, current, or consistently reflected across the global rights-management ecosystem, the company said.
Data gaps and revenue risk#
In one engagement, QRS reviewed a client’s musical works repertoire as registered with its business partners and uncovered thousands of incorrect entries with direct revenue loss implications. Partner databases showed misidentified creators and publishers, incorrect ownership shares, and conflicting versions of the same works, creating fragmentation that undermined accurate royalty collection.
Working with the client, QRS corrected the underlying data and process flows, resulting in measurable revenue uplift. The gap did not surface as one large missing cheque; it accumulated quietly across thousands of works until an unexplained shortfall forced a review.
The industry has made progress on metadata standards and identifiers, but better systems do not automatically produce better outcomes if business relationships, responsibilities, and data flows remain unclear. A musical work sits inside a network of writers, publishers, CMOs, administrators, labels, and digital services, and assuming errors will be corrected downstream can be unreliable. By the time a shortfall is noticed, the problem may have existed for years.
A meaningful repertoire analysis cannot be treated as a technical review. It has to examine how rights are administered, licensed, reported, reconciled, and converted into royalty payments, and it cannot be a one-time exercise. Data degrades through normal business processes, without any foul play, which means verification needs to happen regularly, especially for major catalogues.
QRS leadership and methodology#
QRS was built by professionals who have spent their careers working with CMOs and developing international data standards. The firm describes its expertise as specialized in rights management, data, and the organizations and systems that underpin them.
- Eric Baptiste spent more than 20 years leading the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) and later chaired its board through SOCAN. With colleagues at BIEM (the international body representing mechanical rights societies), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), he helped launch what became Digital Data Exchange (DDEX) at MidemNet 2001.
- Terry Boissonneault and Janice Scott were key architects and implementers of the same CISAC data-exchange standards inside a major CMO.
- Diane Petrucci and Gilles Daigle bring financial and legal expertise that ties data quality directly to revenue and risk.
Rights management connects strategy, legal relationships, financial controls, operations, and technology. A data issue may have a technical cause but a financial consequence, and a royalty discrepancy may trace back to a copyright ownership question.
A good repertoire data analysis does not stop at a list of errors. It should help an organization prioritize what to fix, determine whether the fix requires new technology, better process, or engagement with CMOs, publishers and sub-publishers, and support implementation. Through its Insight consulting practice, QRS works across business strategy, audit, finance, and technology to connect the diagnosis to the environment that created it.
As music becomes increasingly global and catalogues change hands, new forms of exploitation raise fresh questions about ownership and attribution. The relevant question is not whether an organization has data, but whether that data is helping or working against its ability to collect the revenue it is owed. A valuable catalogue requires data scrutiny comparable to any other revenue-generating asset.
Implementation and market entry#
Fixing faulty data means engaging the appropriate stakeholders such as CMOs, publishers, sub-publishers, and others who have to implement the corrections, and that is often where repertoire data audits stall. QRS says it has established relationships with dozens of key industry players around the world and works with clients to resolve issues rather than only delivering a report.
The same network extends beyond repertoire audits. QRS says its leadership has operated at the highest levels of the international music industry for decades. The firm has guided a new performing rights organization through its launch and regularly helps clients navigate CMO and CISAC rules, procedures, and institutional relationships, resulting in increased revenue.
QRS also supports organizations that are new to the industry and still shaping their strategy around revenue identification for asset creators. Across several engagements in multiple countries, QRS has helped emerging players understand the dynamics of the rights-management ecosystem. The firm evaluates the technical foundations of their products and provides recommendations to pivot strategy, offerings, and operational systems to better identify, track, and deliver revenue to creators. Through targeted strategic guidance and technical product reviews, QRS says these organizations have strengthened their service models and achieved significantly improved outcomes.
