CMRRA is pleased to announce its very first distribution of broadcast mechanical royalties using its new License and Distribution System (LDS). As we reported in December, new phases of this system will continue to be rolled out throughout 2015. The first module, launched in 2014, allowed for the processing of mechanical licences and royalties from the major labels, and incorporated many new process improvements. Our recent distribution of broadcast mechanical royalties marks the next milestone in this project design. New modules will be added to accommodate our various other business lines, including the licensing of online music services offering downloads, on-demand streaming and webcasting.
According to CMRRA’s President Caroline Rioux, “CMRRA’s legacy system could not effectively manage the large volumes of data that have become prevalent in today’s environment. In order to more effectively handle the collection and distribution of royalties for its clients, CMRRA needed to invest in new technology to allow for improved processing and communication between all parties involved while also effecting major operational cost savings.”
CMRRA is extremely pleased with the matching capability of LDS, which has enabled us to achieve a far greater level of automated work matches than our old systems could have done. Suggested matches are also provided, and these, along with the system’s innate workflow functionality, greatly speeds up the processing time on manual matching. This enables us to focus manual work more effectively on the identification of new works and ownership share registrations.
This new system is being designed by Spanish Point Technologies combining a suite of Microsoft technologies including Microsoft SQL, BizTalk, SharePoint and Azure. “Our design ensures a high degree of integration between modules. By using an integrated technology stack from Microsoft, our solution ensures that CMRRA leverages the latest developments in areas such as system integration, parsing, transformations, human-based workflow full-text indexing and searching.” says John Corley, CTO, Spanish Point.
The staged implementation approach means that CMRRA publishers will see royalty statements from two different systems in the short term but, in the longer term, they will benefit from combined statements and payments for all business lines in one easy to use format. Next up will be the rollout of CWR processing in LDS, which will begin in the second quarter of 2015. We will slowly begin reaching out to CWR submitters to transition them to a more secure file transfer protocol for newly submitted CWR files.
