2000 to 2006: Focus on Shareholders
In July 2000, the senior Chief Executive Officers of five leading Collective Management Organizations (BMI, GEMA, SACEM, SGAE and SIAE) agreed to a new technical partnership called FastTrack. In September of that year, prior to the opening of the CISAC Congress in Santiago (Chile), the first Chairman of the FastTrack Supervisory Board, Mauro Masi, was elected and the creation of headquarters in Paris was approved. January 1st, 2001 the legal entity was established. Chris van Houten, an experienced copyright executive, was hired as Director General.
The FastTrack alliance envisioned an infrastructure relying on the Internet to provide the platform to support a global, distributed digital copyright network model, a revolutionary concept in 2000. The idea was to interconnect the existing digital resources among the five founder societies and to rely on working groups comprising existing member-society experts and staff to develop and implement the network.
2006 to 2012: Partnership and Shared Vision with CISAC
Since these early days additional Shareholders have joined the company. FastTrack now serves 13 Shareholder societies and more than 120 CISAC organizations which administer intellectual property rights in more than 100 countries, relying on a global network infrastructure that provides metadata on more than 30 million unique musical and audio-visual works and agreements.
From the beginning FastTrack was committed to the adoption of CISAC’s Common Information System (CIS) setting the stage for the ‘CIS-Net powered by FastTrack’ portal in 2005. Some new centralized solutions, such as Audio-Visual Information (AVI) and the Common Search Index (CSI) have also been added to the CIS-Net platform.
The original vision on which the company was founded still provides the guidelines for its operation: creation of virtual databases accessed through the Internet; flexibility; low overhead; reliance upon experienced staff to provide expertise; sharing knowledge and best practices to improve tools and business processes respecting cultural differences in regard to system management.
2013: Transition to a New Era of Transparency and Openness to the Music Industry Stakeholders
Having spent the last decade developing technological solutions, FastTrack has gained extensive knowledge and expertise in how to establish tools and documentation services, both centralized and decentralized. That knowledge may be useful to the entire music industry.
With changes during the summer of 2013 in FastTrack’s Management and Board of Directors, a new era began for FastTrack. The Board named Buma / Stemra’s Hein van der Ree as Chairperson assisted by SOCAN’s Eric Baptiste as vice-Chair respectively. Michel Allain joined FastTrack Headquarters as Director General, following Van Houten’s retirement.
Since January 2014 the Board, with the addition of Brazil’s UBC, focused on FastTrack’s strategy for 2020, including FastTrack mission and core values, and the evolution of FastTrack solutions and services. This new strategy will have an impact on FastTrack governance and organization, as the governance of FastTrack will need to be thoroughly revisited to open its doors to Publishers and to Creators. Part of the strategy has already unanimously been approved by the 13 members of our Board and the final vision, including the involvement of industry stakeholders in the definition of new solutions, should be adopted at the occasion of the November 2014 Board meeting in Tokyo.
FastTrack is now experiencing a very exciting period of transition towards its new era of transparency and openness with the help and collaboration of its Shareholders together with external stakeholders. We anticipate starting early in 2015 with the beginning of the development of a new tool that will break the boundaries of documentation with the objective of delivering a common, complete and accurate view of worldwide copyright metadata using an agile, cost-effective and inclusive approach.
Annick Duflos, Information and Communications Director
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