We sat down with Cole Davis, entertainment lawyer and founder of Switchchord, an identity-focused platform creating tools for music creators and organisations that connect parties through verifiable data. Since its inception, Switchchord has been on a mission to streamline the complex legal relationships that bind the industry’s many participants. These relationships, traditionally tangled in paper-based contracts, often lead to inefficiencies and challenges in proving authority and ownership claims.
We're talking to Cole about the future of rights management in the music industry, current issues the industry has, Switchchord’s journey, and the technological advancements they’ve introduced to make the complex legal stuff easier for artists, managers, publishers, and other participants of the music supply chain.
At its core, Switchchord maps legal relationships
In the music industry, virtually every participant is connected somehow by one or more legal contracts. Many of the industry’s inefficiencies flow from an inability to prove the authority or legal relationships that are stuck in all of these paper-based contracts. A common pattern in the music industry is someone needing to prove “I have the authority to do X on behalf of Y given Z conditions.” Think of a publisher representing a songwriter in a certain territory.
The authority for taking these actions is usually found in a paper-based contract, but the way that authority is “operationalized” so the industry can function is by manual entry into many different databases. From there, we often assume that someone has the authority they claim they have because, well, “the database says so.” But this ignores that the entire system is dynamic and those databases are very often out of date and inconsistent with each other. This is due to a fundamental disconnect between those databases and the legal system.
Source: Switchchord
I became frustrated with how inefficient all of this was, so my goal back in 2016, when I was still practising law, was to create a framework to map those legal relationships to do two things. First, to let people easily prove they have a certain level of authority to do things, like licence a song or represent a songwriter. And second, to route data directly from legal contracts into downstream databases. My hypothesis back then was that if you know the identities of the contracting parties, and those identities can receive messages, that’s going to tell you where to send data.
For example, if a songwriter “signs” with a music publisher, we know the songwriter is going to be sending data about compositions they write to that publisher, and the publisher is probably sending data about licences and royalties to the writer. We also know that the publisher will likely need to prove they have the authority to grant licences on behalf of the songwriter.
By mapping the legal relationships between music industry participants via an identity-based approach, we know where to send the data and what format to send the data in. That's what Switchchord is.
That’s a pretty basic concept and seems obvious. But to do any of this the way I was envisioning, you first first need to give cross-platform identities to all these people and organisations in the supply chain, because this identity needs to be able to work across different software systems. It’s almost like a passport for your music industry interactions. And if we’re going to let those identities send legal and identity data to each other, we need to make sure those identities are verified and cryptographically secure. We don’t want to fall back on emails and text messages–those are part of the reason for the metadata mess we’re in.
We're currently running a pilot with a well-known publishing administration company. They'll use Switchchord to route data from writers to the publishers the writers are signed to, and then from those publishers to the publishing admin company. By modelling the chain of legal relationships–writer to publisher to publishing administrator–we know where to route data about new compositions. That lets us pretty much eliminate manual data entry across different software systems, because we can translate the data into the formats each organisation needs. So from a recording studio or writer room, we can send the data into the existing copyright management systems the different publishers use almost instantly.
What’s even better is that by mapping the legal relationships between the writers and publishers, we then know what the copyright status of the resulting composition is. For example, let’s say two songwriters write a new song together and agree they wrote it 50/50. One writer, Writer A, is signed to a major publisher and previously sold the copyrights to songs they write for the next year. The other writer, Writer B, isn’t signed to a publisher and owns his or her copyrights, but hires a publishing administrator to licence the songs. From the legal relationship mapping, we know the resulting copyright is going to be owned 50% by Writer A’s publisher and 50% by Writer B, with administration split between Writer A’s publisher and Writer B’s publishing administrator.
We've had a lot more interest in what we do on the recorded music side recently. Many music companies have both publishing and label operations, and they’re looking for a better way to receive data from “out in the field” and send it across the enterprise. Some music companies use the same system for publishing and recordings, while others use separate systems. Switchchord doesn’t really care what system they use, we can route data the same either way. And we can enable those users to create automations and integrations, a bit like Zapier does across services like Slack and Google Drive, so that different aspects of the legal and identity data can be sent to different services. So maybe the demo and master need to go to DISCO or another song pitching service, the publishing splits and IPI information needs to go to Vistex or Curve, and the recording data needs to go to OpenPlay. We’re building the pipes to enable that automatically, with zero manual data entry.
The identity system is also really helpful for recording credits. From the legal mapping, we can tell who the featured artists are, but then you have lots of non-featured artists and studio musicians who need to be credited accurately for union payments and to make progress in their career. Those credits are like a resume, and we want to make sure they can reflect them accurately. We can also route data to neighbouring rights organisations relating to recordings, just like we can for performing rights organisations on the publishing side. So in a sense we’re building these legal “pipes” to make sure verifiable data can flow properly throughout the supply chain.
We're trying to facilitate these solutions and interactions, and we view everyone as either a partner or a customer because everyone has the same problem.
Our go-to-market approach is to serve everyone
We decided to tackle publishing first, before recordings, because we felt like the publishing world was being neglected, and “it all begins with a song.” We want to be flexible enough to help the full spectrum of publishers–majors, indies, even down to the single songwriter that owns their own publishing and is just trying to make a living in the industry, which is difficult. For that person, we want to have publishing in a box and be able to support them too. We can get them professionalised of sorts, get them signed up to a PRO, get their IPI number verified and assign them a verified ISNI, get them documenting their compositions correctly so that if a publisher wants to sign them, it's a really easy onboarding process. Otherwise, it's a lot of unnecessary manual data entry.
We also focus on identity verification and fraud prevention, which is a really important topic right now in the streaming world. We're talking to several well-known distributors about potential white-labelled identity verification products that would create a “fast lane” of sorts for verified identities who are uploading recordings. We made the decision long ago to tackle what we view as the root problem in the music industry, and it’s exciting to see the reaction when people realise how comprehensively we’ve approached these problems.
We’ve had to be patient because the music industry moves slowly with new technology and these are really hard, entrenched problems, but the progress we’re now seeing is inspiring. That's the ultimate goal of Switchboard—to be flexible and support people across the whole industry.
How Switchchord ensures your data is protected
That's where the identity system comes in; it's called decentralised identity. It's an open standard that was facilitated by what's called the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C—the internet standard setting organisation. They created HTML and HTTP and all the things that make the Internet work. Tim Berners-Lee founded it with CERN in the 1990s and is still the founding director.
This identity system was created, incubated, cultivated through that organisation. It's open source software, interoperable across industries, territories, jurisdictions. The identifiers themselves are created by the end-user and are derived from cryptography. It’s not blockchain but it does share some underlying cryptographic building blocks. It’s a bit like picking a random star out of the universe. The numbers are so big that it’s very, very unlikely anyone else will pick that star (aka secret number).
So that random star is basically your identity, and we help you bind information to it so you can prove your identity to others. And the amazing thing is that you created it, so you control it. Unlike all the identifiers in use today–emails, Twitter handles, your Facebook account–you actually “own” this identity and the data associated with it. All those others are technically leased to you and can be taken from you, along with the data and reputation you’ve built up with them. That can be devastating to creators who amass huge social media followings.
It's important because these new identities let you make digital signatures on data, and that's how you can tell if data was tampered with. If you digitally sign some data with your identity and send it to someone else, say your publisher, and a “bad guy” tampers with the message in transit, your publisher can detect that. That’s at the core of how we map identities, because we view legal contracts as basically statements made by the parties to that contract. Once that contract is digitally signed and the data gets routed around the industry, all the organisations with the downstream databases need to be sure that, first, the identities are who they say they are, and second, that the data provenance is secure–meaning it wasn’t tampered with as it flows through the supply chain.
We view identity & legal concepts as different views of the same underlying thing. It’s essential from a security and confidentiality standpoint. It plays into everything we do.
We're entering a world where anything can be faked and you need digital signatures on both the digital content and the legal relationship. They're slightly different, but you need them on both. A bit like a legal chain of title and a data chain of title.
For now, we maintain the cryptographic key pairs for each identity because if you lose your private key, you effectively lose your identity. It's a similar user experience problem that blockchain has. If you're interacting in the Ethereum world, you need a digital wallet that holds your private keys. And it's kind of a pain because if you want to be relatively secure, you need a little USB stick-looking thing that you stick in, and that's how you digitally sign things. Or you basically hand over your private key to a trusted third party and say “here, do it for me, this is too hard.” Which is fine but that gives up the security and control that you as the identity controller can technically have. Anyone doing decentralised identity has the same problem because the underlying cryptography is what provides the security.
Do we expect songwriters to be digitally signing their online interactions with a USB stick? No, there's no way. We take the approach that for now, we're that trusted third party, we will manage that stuff for you, and we will put in place all the key management protocols and schemes that are good security practices. We will hand over the keys and the cryptographic information to you when you're ready. If you're comfortable with it, we will eventually hand it off to you. So we view it as a spectrum, baby steps into actual decentralisation because there's a lot of power that comes with it, but there's a lot of responsibility.
The future of music rights management is an identity-based approach
All of the participants in the music supply chain are using slightly different software and slightly different ways to send data to each other. This siloed approach where everyone's keeping things in their own little database, and it can't interoperate, it's all very inconsistent—we waste so much time and money just checking to see if things are the same. This is very inefficient from a day-to-day standpoint, you're constantly manually entering data about identities and legal relationships across databases. Why not use the same decentralised identities across these different databases, and everyone can “ask” those identities for the most up to date information about them? We could probably cut the music industry’s IT costs in half by that simple measure.
You're never going to have one magical holy grail database, you have to figure out how we can at least have all the different databases speak a similar language. Thankfully we now have the MLC, but this database, even if it's the best thing we've had yet, is still not 100%. It’s inherently divorced from the legal system. And it doesn't manage identities and communication workflows. I think we need an interoperable identity system so that all music supply chain participants can communicate with each other.
I think an identity-based approach is the only way to solve those problems. That's why every day I'm out evangelising this technology–it's open to use, other industries are using it. But the music industry historically tends to be behind the curve on technology, more reactionary. I'm just showing people that it works, you can trust it.
