Data

The National Music Publishers Association agreed this week to sell the Harry Fox Agency, the music industry’s dominant clearing house for mechanical rights, to Seasac, the No. 3 performance rights organization (PRO) for songwriters and publishers behind Ascap and BMI.

The deal will create for the first time a single entity that can license both performance and recording rights in a single package, helping to simplify the notoriously complex system of music rights often blamed for making it difficult to launch new music services.

NMPA has owned the Harry Fox Agency since it was founded in 1927. The agency collects the statutory royalties paid by record labels and artists to songwriters and publishers for the right to record a song. At one time, the cash generated by HFA funded the bulk of NMPA’s operations. But as streaming has supplanted record sales, so-called mechanical rights have become less valuable.

For Sesac, however, which collects royalties when any of the the songs in its catalog are performed in public, whether live or from a recording, the value of HFA has more to do with the data it collects than the cash it throws off.

By bringing performance and mechanical licensing under one roof, Sesac will now have clear visibility into how streaming and sales affect each other and can provide rights owners deeper insights into how their portfolios are performing.

“Through its unparalleled network of commercial relationships with over 48,000 music publishers, HFA has created one of the largest and most comprehensive databases of musical works in the world, including metadata on over 6.7 million compositions and 21.4 million unique master recordings,” Sesac said in a press release. “SESAC will integrate this database with its own and, utilizing SESAC’s state of the art information technology and data systems, create the leading rights tracking, royalty accounting and payment platform in the music industry. In addition, SESAC plans to introduce an expanded suite of services for publishers on the HFA platform including micro-licensing on social video networks, automated license verification with RADKey™ and premium YouTube Content ID administration services via its Rumblefish subsidiary.”

Sesac said it also plans to invest heavily in HFA’s Slingshot platform, which “provides royalty tracking, administration and payment services and solutions to virtually every digital music service of scale in the market today.”

The deal will also give Sesac a leg up on its larger rivals, Ascap and BMI, which operate under consent decrees with the Justice Department and are currently barred from collecting mechanical royalties. While the Justice Department is considering relaxing some of those restrictions HFA has by far the largest catalog of mechanical rights in the industry.

Live event producer Live Nation also sees gold in the data it collects. The company this week announced plans to expand its Fan Connect programmatic ad platform by leveraging data from ticket sales, app activation, beacons at its venues and other sources.  Through its acquisition of Ticketmaster in 2009, Live Nation now has a wealth of data on who its customers are, where they will be at particular times, how many people they will be with and other parameters, which it plans to make available to marketers for both online and offline targeting.

The company aims to capitalize on its ability to know where and when an individual will be in one of its venues or festivals, from famous music halls like the Fillmore and the Gramercy Theatre to its four-day Bonnaroo music festival.

“Because we have these owned and operated offline/online properties, it gives us a whole new way to target individuals across a variety of screens,” Live Nation SVP of digital sales, Jeremy Levine, told AdExchanger.

And that’s a whole new beat count.