IMRO deploys award winning technology to streamline royalty payment process
The Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) has deployed a new royalty distribution system designed to meet the demands of the Internet age.
The Hot Press Newsdesk, 28 Sep 2007
The move comes as the rapidly growing numbers of music and video streaming and downloads bring more complexity to the role of accurately distributing royalties to IMRO members.
Responsible for collecting monies on behalf of songwriters, composers, music publishers and affiliated members of overseas societies, IMRO has to annually match around 10 million performances to a database of over 8 million copyrighted works. Anticipating an on-going increase in the amount of data it will have to handle, IMRO began to plan and develop a new distribution system to better manage this data and accurately distribute payments to members.
"Music and video downloads and streaming, online rights and the ever-growing radio, TV and on-line market in Ireland have created increasingly larger amounts of data," explains Declan Rudden, IMRO's Director of Distribution and IT. "The only way we can address the opportunities these new growing revenue streams present to our members is to be able to process the data more efficiently."
A Dublin-based IT company, Spanish Point Technologies, devised an innovative solution built on Microsoft technologies including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (SharePoint) and Microsoft BizTalk Server (BizTalk) to deliver the full range of business functions required by IMRO's Distribution Department in a single system.
IMRO customers including radio stations, TV stations and digital service providers, can easily provide usage information in standardised formats which greatly speed up the integration and processing of this data. This data, which contains information about performances, needs to be matched with corresponding composers, songwriters and publishers. This in turn ensures that the right amounts of royalties are paid out. Whilst the concept of royalty sharing is quite simple, the actual data processing is quite complex.
The new system reduces the amount of manual intervention, which lessens the likelihood of human error. Ultimately the new system will support IMRO's main goal of paying royalties as quickly and as cost effectively as possible.
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