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<\/a><\/p>\nHitting play on transformation \u201cMany copyright organisations have failed to cope with this increase in data volumes, meaning the songs and recordings have not been licensed or correctly identified. The license income that should have been paid to songwriters and music publishers has remained with streaming companies. The streaming services and other entertainment platforms do want to pay the artists, it\u2019s just a question of finding a practical way of doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n The solution developed by Spanish Point saw CMRRA move its operations to the cloud, enabling it to successfully cope with these challenges and generate more income for its members. Using Microsoft\u2019s advanced features, Spanish Point provided a more agile and responsive service at a lower cost than a traditional on-premise or hosted provider.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the past, if a song was played on a radio station it was broadcast to thousands of listeners,\u201d Cullen explains. \u201cNow you have people using their smartphone in cars to stream music. Services like Spotify and YouTube are sending data to rights organisations on each individual stream. That has increased the volume of data by three or four orders of magnitude.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is not unusual for files to contain 200 million transactions. The rights organisations now must identify each song from quite poor metadata and find the artists to pay royalties to. There is simply no way they could do that without a cloud solution. Even four or five years ago it would have been beyond our reach. It has enabled us to help customers like CMRRA improve their data processing performance by a factor of 40.\u201d<\/p>\n Moving to the cloud solved the problems of scale, flexibility and financial viability. \u201cBefore the cloud, organisations would invest in computing power to meet peak demand,\u201d Cullen notes. \u201cThat meant the payroll system had to be able to meet very high demand on one or two days each month while it would be barely used for the rest of the time. In the cloud you pay for what you use as you need it. Also, Microsoft\u2019s cloud autoscales to meet the size of files and that\u2019s directly related to how much we and our customers are going to get paid.\u201d<\/p>\n Microsoft Ireland commercial director Aisling Curtis believes the challenge faced by the music rights industry demonstrates the enormous power of digital culture. \u201cThis is a great example of digital disruption and how a digital transformation approach can be used to solve issues across an entire industry\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not just something for large companies or enterprise-sized organisations to be concerned about. Organisations of every size can adopt a digital culture to innovate and gain competitive advantage. Spanish Point has done a fantastic job for CMRRA using the Microsoft platform and has created a new solution which is applicable to the whole music rights industry.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Spanish Point had already digitised the process for the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO), but it wasn\u2019t just a case of dealing with increased transaction volumes, as Spanish Point CEO Donal Cullen explains: \u201cThere is also the problem of matching millions of music streaming transactions with poor metadata against a database of millions of songs,\u201d he states.<\/p>\n