Since March 2015 CISAC Secretariat and FastTrack Management teams reinforced their cooperation, especially in the field of the implementation of identifiers, standards and business rules. A common governance body, the Cross-Industry Steering Committee, has been created in which approximately 60 representatives of Publishers’ (Sony/EMI, Kobalt, AIMPF and IMPF), Creators’ organizations (CIAM, ECSA and MCNA) and CMOs are deeply involved.
Our developments related to the so-called ‘Quick Wins’ have started under the umbrella of the “Joint Project Lead”, a subset of the Cross-Industry Steering Committee. The “ISWC Resolution Service” has recently been technically delivered and key-testers are currently proceeding to final tests before acceptance, final delivery and full implementation that will allow disseminating ISWCs (International Standard Musical Work Codes) towards Publishers. The “Single Works Dashboard” (SWD) that will provide multi-territorial information on works should be delivered in June 2016 as part of the CIS-Net new major release.
The developments of the “Right-Holders access to CIS-Net” should start this year, as the extended scope and the principle of a new concept, the collaborative opt-in model to provide access to Publishers and Creators, is strongly supported by FastTrack and CISAC Boards. Once delivered, Creators and Publishers should get their dedicated view on “CIS-Net powered by FastTrack”. Concretely speaking, and to simplify something rather complex, this means Publishers should have access to shares information of all the Publishers being part of the collaborative opt-in, and Creators should have access to their shares information and to Publishers shares information for works in which they are involved.
Until now, a first preliminary feasibility study to validate this new concept has been conducted, but it still needs to be further investigated in order to provide a more comprehensive and global picture.
Before moving to the development phase the Boards also recommended the project team to go further with statistics, and to get more involvement from the new stakeholders in order to get the most accurate figures on works that should be made available with this new concept.
In the light of the progress made from November 2015 to March 2016, namely on Rights-Holders access to CIS-Net, our Boards will probably make further decisions on the occasion of the March 2016 Boards in Toronto. Well, it’s worth keeping an eye on what will happen in March. Within 3 months a huge amount of work involving CMOs, representatives of Publishers and Songwriters and CISAC Secretariat, still needs to be accomplished.
Michel Allain, Director General
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