The sheer complexity of the global music licensing landscape favours no one other than those who benefit from that very complexity. For example, the consensus is that something in the region of 20% of collected music royalties are never paid back to songwriters or artists because they are not successful identified by the parties that collected the royalties on their behalf. This ‘black box’ revenue then either gets redistributed to identified artists and songwriters on a share basis or gets fed straight into the bottom line. Some entities work tirelessly to identify the creators, others do not. Rights complexity is not however a new thing, what is though, is the sheer volume of data. It is under the weight of this streaming data that the old system is buckling. What you would expect in such a complex and convoluted system is a central database that enables all parties to cross reference each other and reduce risk of misreporting. No such database exists…