“By investing in a music identification pioneer, we are adding an important key competence to our portfolio: digital music identification,” GEMA CEOsaid in the announcement. “The investment in a future-oriented technology is a decisive step for GEMA on the way to becoming a powerful digital collecting society.”
For decades, almost all CMOs had de facto monopolies within their home countries. But European Union legislation has forced many global societies to compete with one another to represent rights they can then license online, although they maintain their offline monopolies in their home markets. Much of this competition involves money: Who can get the best rates or, in some cases, find the most uses of compositions in order to collect royalties on them. One element of that is accurately identifying songs, a far thornier technical challenge than identifying recordings.
“We are convinced that the potential of our monitoring technology is far from exhausted,” Harold de Groot, founder of SoundAware, said in the announcement. “With GEMA as a strong partner, we want to develop new digital services for the music industry based on this technology and distribute them internationally.”