FastTrack has played a unique role in music ecosystem by developing and maintaining the backbone through which ever-increasing amounts of data flow from one side of the world where it is used to pay the songwriters and publishers of a song that was written on the other side of the world.
FastTrack was founded in 2000 to address a challenge: the network of collective management organizations (CMOs) around the world rely on each other to license the local exploitations of their members’ works, but the licensing CMO can’t know to whom the royalties should be paid if they don’t have timely access to the documentation relating to the other CMOs’ repertoire when it is used in their market.
Working closely with CISAC for the benefit of the entire network of CMOs, FastTrack built the tools to enable each organization to access relevant documentation relating to each other’s repertoire. With the launch of ‘CIS-Net powered by FastTrack’, when a CMO receives a usage report that lists a song title that the CMO doesn’t recognize, it can search across massive databases of the other CMOs to identify the work. CIS-Net song title searches are now a regular and important part of the workflows for more than 120 collective rights managers around the world.
Similarly, as audio-visual programs increasingly find their way into international markets, there is a need for CMOs to access the cue sheets to identify the music contained in the programming. FastTrack’s CIS-Net Audio-Visual Index (AVI) allows CMOs to determine whether the cue sheet is available from another CMO. Many societies now have the capability to receive and respond to cue sheet requests from other CMOs electronically and automatically, thereby making critical data available fast and efficiently. In recent years, this tool has been made available to publisher members so that they can make sure that cue sheets containing their music are available through the network.
FastTrack tools also play a key role in the issuance and maintenance of the standard identifiers that are used by the industry to uniquely identify musical works and its creator(s) and publisher(s). FastTrack’s Common Search Index (CSI) holds authoritative, verified International Standard Work Codes (ISWCs) which helps to maintain the integrity of the standard, and the link established through CIS-Net to the Interested Party Index (IPI) helps CMOs uniquely and accurately identify the royalty participants on a given work.
Today, FastTrack maintains it’s founding philosophy of helping its part of the music ecosystem to achieve common goals through a collaborative, agile, cost-efficient development of value-oriented and cutting edge technology for CMOs to efficiently and effectively serve their songwriters, composers, and music publishers.
John Coletta and Ed Oshanani, BMI
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