Paradise launches TRIDES audio recognition tool

Founded in 2009, Paradise offers a range of services for independent artists and labels, including distribution, publishing and neighbouring rights collection. The label has recently made a foray into booming music markets such as Africa and Latin America.

The tool helps users identify unknown audio content and retrieve more in uncollected cash from two ‘black boxes’ of uncollected royalties, which include missing mechanical rights payments from digital service providers (DSPs) and missing payments for the usage of recorded music by broadcasters and public-facing businesses around the world.

The company hopes to roll out the feature to more regions globally, including territories like Africa, where the label believes it will be a game changer. Last year, the company signed direct licensing contracts with a number of DSPs in Africa.

“Our experiences from third-party audio recognition services has been okay, but ultimately it’s always disappointed in terms of the data reporting we and our independent clients get back,” Paradise founder and managing director Ralph Boege told MBW. “The aim of TRIDES is to integrate everybody in the music industry and never have any gap [in data].

Boege says the tool’s data exchange model will make data more accessible to independent labels and artists. “The fees are so high to get data back [from some audio recognition services], it could bankrupt some small labels,” he said. “Getting that data back should come as a mandatory condition of those labels allowing [said services] to use their data in the first place. Whether an artist or label comes from Kenya, Mexico, Sweden, the US or Germany, access to industry-standard data should be available to all – and it is our aim to make that a reality.”

In February, about $424m in unclaimed backdated royalties were paid out by DSPs to the Mechanical Licensing Collective, which is responsible for distributing the money to the correct copyright owners.

Boege added: “The modern industry needs to rely on unique data it can trust, and the only way to get that data is through audio fingerprinting. Therefore, the industry needs to switch its focus to audio data and invest in a database designed to create unique audio fingerprinting. Until then, things will not get better.”

Poor data management and inefficient systems in the digital ecosystem have resulted in billions of lost revenue, according to a recent Synchtank report.

“Today, some collection societies cannot do the job [of data matching] because they don’t have a proper data model that allows them to match even something as rudimentary as a track title, and then report and distribute the revenues to the correct independent rights owner,” Boege said.