ASCAP and BMI, the nation’s two leading performing rights organizations, today announced the launch of SONGVIEW, a comprehensive data platform that provides music users with an authoritative view of copyright ownership and administration shares in the vast majority of music licensed in the United States. SONGVIEW technology allows ASCAP and BMI to seamlessly display an agreed-upon view of detailed, aggregated and reconciled ownership data for performing rights for more than 20 million musical works in their combined repertoires, including a breakdown of shares by ASCAP and BMI. The information is accessible, free to the public, on both ASCAP’s and BMI’s websites.
ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews commented: “This project is all about providing greater transparency for everyone who relies on this copyright data to guide important business decisions. When you see the SONGVIEW checkmark, you know that the data is consistent in both ASCAP and BMI’s copyright systems. Drawing upon our 185 years of combined ASCAP and BMI expertise in managing complex and dynamic copyright data, we have built a convenient new digital tool for anyone who licenses music. This release is our first iteration of SONGVIEW, and we are committed to enhancing this new platform as our industry evolves.”
BMI President and CEO Mike O’Neill added: “When two companies that are fierce competitors come together on a project this ambitious to address a need identified by the marketplace, it says a lot about how important greater data transparency is to both of our organizations. Today’s launch is a good first step in the ongoing evolution of transparent and accessible data, and I am pleased with what we have accomplished so far to meet the evolving needs of the music industry. I look forward to continuing to expand on the possibilities of SONGVIEW in the future.”
For the initial launch of SONGVIEW, data was drawn from over 20 million songs in ASCAP and BMI’s combined repertoires and put through the SONGVIEW reconciliation engine. The SONGVIEW engine is a sophisticated new system, built from the ground up by the two performing rights organizations, that ingests song ownership information from both BMI and ASCAP, processes and reconciles that information based on agreed-upon rules, and then sends the reconciled data back out to BMI and ASCAP’s public, searchable databases.
The BMI and ASCAP online databases now display the breakdown of ownership shares by ASCAP share percentage, BMI share percentage, and shares listed as Other, if applicable. Additional information featured in SONGVIEW includes: Songwriters and their affiliations, Publishers, Performers, alternate song titles, ISWC and IPI codes, BMI and ASCAP song IDs (if applicable), and publisher contact information. Reconciled songs appear with a green checkmark to indicate that ASCAP and BMI agree on the information and have the same data in each of their respective systems.
A cross-functional team of copyright, technical, distribution and product experts from BMI and ASCAP began the SONGVIEW project in an effort to provide the industry with more clarity around ownership shares by ASCAP and BMI. Drawing upon their combined expertise, the team was able to build an entirely new technology platform and deliver a solution that is accurate, reliable, user-friendly, and importantly, scalable to enable future growth and improvement.
For more information visit ascap.com/songview or bmi.com/songview.
