Using a premium subscriber profile as a reference, our laboratory affiliated to UQAM political science department and to the Centre for research on integration and globalization (CEIM) has conducted tests on music streaming services from March to August 2019. Our singular experiment targeted measuring the quality of service of transnational streaming platforms in a substantial niche market based on a repertoire of over 40 years of independent music production.

The Canadian province of Quebec has a mature recording industry from which the major labels and distributors have been largely absent since the 1980’s. Despite this, it has enabled international careers to develop and strive, notably the likes of Celine Dion, Coeur de Pirate, Grimes, Chromeo or Patrick Watson. Another aspect of this niche market is its majority proportion of french expression artists which can be isolated in terms of research material and studied as a specific cultural phenomenon. Very few western cultural environments have such a circumscribed popular music repertoire largely adopted and consumed by its locals. A recent article in daily newspaper Le Devoir1 cites sources who warns federal political parties in the context of the upcoming Canadian fall elections about the risk of erosion of this specific culture. Solange Drouin, the spokesperson for ADISQ, a Quebec indie label association, says musical albums have dropped from 13 millions units sold in 2005 to less than 3 millions last year.

LATICCE is a constituency of the University du Québec à Montreal (UQAM) and its name stands for Research Laboratory on Discoverability of Cultural Content in a Digital Transformation Context (Laboratoire de recherche sur la découvrabilité et les transformations des industries culturelles à l’ère du commerce électronique). Our small team of around 10 people has been working for the last 2 years on the creation of a discoverability index allowing to measure levels of inventory and quality of recommendations of niche repertoires like the one of Quebec’s french expression indie artists. We believe our raw findings can foster deeper investigations into how taste profiling algorithms can generate proper music playlist construction in the interest of the diversity of cultural expressions. We also believe streaming platforms need to improve targeting subscribers in local markets to retain proper levels of adoption for their products, reflect users preferences and their “discoverability profiles”. Our recent findings could do just that.

Our method is based on some six data point levels : Presence, Visibility and Recommendation which itself lies upon Concordance, Relevance and Freshness (levels of new releases). We have used sample lists of official new releases and historical winners of 40 years of Felix Gala, Quebec’s equivalent of the Grammy’s or Juno’s. We have built persona and user stories and done API queries, web scrapping and human observations on three major music streaming services : Apple Music, Google Play Music and Spotify.

Our most interesting findings are with regards to our reference persona. Designed as an early thirties women, our “niche profiled” subscriber (we will not disclose her name) has opened premium accounts on streaming services. She has bought, added to her library and listened to her favorite music on curated playlists and her own personalized playlist for 21 weeks.

Despite strong emphasis by music services on the quality of the personalized music experience they offer their subscribers, none of the 21 weeks of listening offered nearly what our persona expected. The services offered very varied Cold Start issue reaction (the ability of recommending content with very little data history), the worst being Apple who could not generate any automatic playlist after six weeks of paying subscriptions, the most intriguing being Google with propositions the first day. Overall, the services took very large liberties with the taste profile of our virtual guinea-pig. Our young women has been voluntarily listening to a very consistent and narrow scope of music : she only listens to Quebec based artists signing in French. She listens to this type of content whether we are talking legacy performers or fresh new young Quebec hip-hop artists. Nevertheless, she ONLY listens to french Quebecois stuff. She was given an average content well below 50/100 discoverability index. Overall the services performance can be characterized by the following : Apple New Music Mix has shown little discrimination with regards to artist notoriety, digging too often in new releases without any traction or history and mixing genres and languages of expression in a very chaotic way; Google J’ai de la chance (I’m feeling lucky Dice App) has on the other extreme offered a very high level of concordance with our initial samples list and been constantly coming back to very expected local mainstream artists; finally Spotify Radar des sorties (Release Radar) had the best mixed qualities, but it offered very many propositions outside of our narrow casted persona, showing way too much random decisions.

All premium streaming services failed to match the very precisely tailored expectations of our niche listener.

To find out more about LATICCE get your french dictionary out and surf to our Wiki space at https://wiki.uqam.ca/display/CEIMLAT/Accueil+LATICCE or write me at Jean-Robert.Bisaillon@enap.ca

1https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/560835/la-culture-canadienne-est-menacee-croit-une-coalition-d-organismes?fbclid=IwAR1QTrzBNd5I9rSyx42YRvcY1BnAhntdM8Xl6WnTK85rl_lel6Qps1layyU

1 octobre 2018 — La veille des projets, guichets de soutien, initiatives de recherche qui suit n’est pas exhaustive. Le lecteur est invité à ajouter, commenter. Notre emphase est mise sur les secteurs de l’enregistrement sonore et des arts de la scène.

Pôle sur les données massives en culture du Partenariat du Quartier des Spectacles — MESI — https://www.quartierdesspectacles.com/fr/medias/donnees_massives_culture

LATICCE Laboratoire de recherche sur la découvrabilité et les transformations des industries culturelles à l’ère du commerce électronique — FQRSC https://wiki.uqam.ca/display/CEIMLAT/Accueil+LATICCE

Fonds Stratégie numérique du Conseil des arts du Canada — https://conseildesarts.ca/financement/fonds-strategiques/fonds-strategie-numerique (31 octobre 2018) — Première cohorte de projets soutenus (2017) https://conseildesarts.ca/-/media/Files/CCA/Funding/StrategicFunds/FondsStrategieNumeriqueResultats2017.xlsx

Stratégie numérique du Québec — MESI — https://www.economie.gouv.qc.ca/fileadmin/contenu/documents_soutien/strategies/economie_numerique/sommaire-dynamique/

Canada créatif et Fonds Exportation Créative Canada — https://www.canada.ca/fr/patrimoine-canadien/services/exportations-industries-creation/strategie-exportation-creative.html

Programme exploration/innovation du Fonds des médias du Canada — (6 novembre 2018) — FMC https://www.cmf-fmc.ca/fr-ca/programmes-et-dates-limites/programmes/programme-d%E2%80%99innovation

Développement des marchés numériques — Musicaction — (15 octobre 2018) http://musicaction.ca/programmes/developpement-marches-numeriques-volet-1-developpement-mise-marche-initiatives-numeriques

Rapport du CRTC sur l’avenir de la distribution de la programmation au Canada — CRTC https://crtc.gc.ca/fra/publications/s15/

Commission Yale — Examen de la législation en matière de radiodiffusion et de télécommunications — Industrie Canada et Patrimoine Canada http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/110.nsf/fra/accueil

Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l’intelligence artificielle et du numérique (septembre 2018) — FRQSC — http://www.scientifique-en-chef.gouv.qc.ca/nouvelles/appel-a-propositions-creation-dun-observatoire-international-impacts-societaux-de-lintelligence-artificielle-numerique/

Déclaration de Montréal pour un développement responsable de l’intelligence artificielle — Université de Montréal https://www.declarationmontreal-iaresponsable.com/la-declaration

PCNQ #120 / Réseau d’agents de développement culturel numérique — SODEC — CALQ — MCCQ — http://culturenumerique.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/120-mettre-sur-pied-et-animer-un-reseau-dagents-de-developpement-culturel-numerique/

PCNQ #117 / Soutenir les regroupements et associations pour intégrer le numérique dans leurs pratiques d’affaires — SODEC — http://culturenumerique.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/117-soutenir-les-regroupements-et-associations-pour-integrer-le-numerique-dans-leurs-pratiques-daffaires/

PCNQ #111 / Plan d’action concernant les données sur les contenus culturels québécois — MCCQ- http://culturenumerique.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/111-mettre-en-place-un-plan-daction-concernant-les-donnees-sur-les-contenus-culturels-quebecois/

PCNQ #102 / Déployer une approche commune relative aux données numériques / Plan d’action pour la musique / Concertation sectorielle autour du projet COLLECTION Socle commun des métadonnées de la musique — SOPROQ — http://culturenumerique.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/102-deployer-une-approche-commune-relative-aux-donnees-numeriques/

PCNQ #62 Permettre aux artistes, aux écrivains et aux organismes artistiques d’utiliser les technologies pour réaliser des activités exploratoires ou déployer des œuvres dans l’univers numérique — CALQ — http://culturenumerique.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/62-permettre-aux-artistes-aux-ecrivains-et-aux-organismes-artistiques-dutiliser-les-technologies-pour-realiser-des-activites-exploratoires-ou-deployer-des-oeuvres-dans-lunivers-nu/

PCNQ #84 Mettre en place un programme de recherche en partenariat avec le Fonds de recherche du Québec — Société et culture afin de stimuler la recherche universitaire à propos du numérique en culture / L’objectif des recherches financées est d’améliorer les connaissances sur l’impact du numérique dans l’écosystème culturel québécois — FRQSC — http://culturenumerique.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/2017-09-19-six-projets-retenus/

Table de concertation intersectorielle et interrégionale en littératie numérique — Printemps numérique http://www.printempsnumerique.ca/nouvelles/article/mise-sur-pied-de-la-premiere-table-de-concertation-intersectorielle-et-interregionale-en-litteratie-numerique-au-quebec/

Québec NumériQC — Programme d’accompagnement Culture NumériQC et Cartographie des acteurs culturels et numériques au Québec http://culturenumeriqc.qcnum.com/

CONFERENCE — Forum Xn Québec 2e Édition 5 au 7 novembre 2018 — SODEC — https://www.xnquebec.co/forum/

CONFERENCE — Défis contemporains et futurs pour la diversité des expressions culturelles. Accès aux données, intelligence artificielle et perspectives internationales — Coalition pour la diversité des expressions culturelles — 25 octobre 14h à 20h https://cdec-cdce.org/defis-contemporains-et-futurs-pour-la-diversite-des-expressions-culturelles-acces-aux-donnees-intelligence-artificielle-et-perspectives-internationales/

La campagne électorale se tient sur fond de dérape environnementale et les partis tentent, comme il se doit, de se rattraper à la dernière minute sur cet enjeu. La campagne a aussi enterré le projet de politique culturelle introduite en juin. Les libéraux eux-mêmes, porteurs du projet, ne font pas de millage dessus.

Nous sommes bien loin des prédictions de prise en otage de la politique culturelle avancée par Odile Tremblay le 13 juin dans Le Devoir (https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/530171/l-otage-des-prochaines-elections).

Ce soir se tient un débat sur la politique culturelle à l’initiative de la Coalition la Culture le Coeur du Québec. Mais j’ai déjà voté par anticipation et j’avais déjà autre chose à l’agenda… https://www.facebook.com/events/691556057887613/

Eh puis autant écrire.

Environnement et culture. Numérique aussi?

Il faut lire le document collaboratif De la politique dans le numérique lancé par Clément Laberge sur son blogue : https://docs.google.com/document/d/15pwLmV404pIPyU-LdeHntX2YHB6o29TR_FFM4Jsjtn0/edit

Le débat de ce soir abordera notamment le thème des travailleurs autonomes qui sont désormais 500 000 au Québec et au nombre desquels doivent bien figurer 20% de travailleurs de la culture.

Comme quoi, les choses sont souvent plus liées qu’elles ne paraissent l’être. Numérique aussi? On y vient…

Le PQ qui a souligné l’enjeu, veut nous aider à souscrire aux régimes d’assurances privés. Je dis nous, car je suis travailleur pigiste en culture. Quant à souscrire à un régime privé, je n’ai pas besoin que le gouvernement s’en mêle, ce n’est pas ce que j’attends des politiques publiques.

Pour poursuivre mon préambule échevelé, je voudrais attirer l’attention sur le fait que la campagne électorale se joue aussi en parallèle avec le projet Constituons! du dramaturge Christian Lapointe appuyé par l’Institut du Nouveau Monde (http://inm.qc.ca/constituons/) et enfin que Nicolas Hulot, ministre français de l’environnement vient de démissionner de ses fonctions en affirmant en gros que nos institutions politiques ne sont plus réformables (ça vous le saviez..). N’ayez crainte, je le répète, toute est dans toute comme disait le poète de la Bitt à Tibi.

Tout cela m’a fait penser à Jeremy Rifkin.

La théorie économique de la troisième révolution industrielle que promeut Jeremy Rifkin offre une perspective attrayante pour le futur et est porteuse d’espoir. En France, dans le Nord-Pas-de-Calais est né le projet REV3 comme rêve (https://twitter.com/rev3?lang=fr).

C’est plutôt inespéré en ces temps lourds, chargés de désordre environnementaux et de tensions idéologiques. Sur ce dernier point, certains seront prompts à affirmer que la vision Rifkin pourrait très bien servir de combustible. Rifkin évoque l’éclipse progressive du capitalisme hiérarchisé que nous connaissons. Par la même occasion, les théories de Jeremy Rifkin re contextualisent tout en remettant de l’avant, diverses notions qui avaient, il y a peu, fait trembler les industries culturelles et notamment celle de la musique, mais dont l’intensité avaient légèrement faibli. Il s’agit des concepts de consensus distribué (que certains appellent la blockchain), de licence globale, d’ouverture des données, de partage, de communs collaboratifs (licences Creative Commons) et d’économie sociale. On voit curieusement dans ces concepts politiques la marque de termes tout droit tirés du très en vogue concept de littératie numérique. Comme quoi, les perspectives de progrès social, politique, écologique sont tout à fait liées au numérique, les concepts des deux univers se croisant, se chevauchant, s’enrichissant mutuellement. Il faut en effet que le numérique compense sa lourde empreinte écologique et trouve à nous rassurer à l’aube de l’arrivée des taxis sans chauffeurs.

Loin d’affirmer que l’approche Rifkin soit tout à fait réaliste ou infaillible, ces idées sont destinées à prendre sérieusement du service. Il est intéressant d’essayer de mieux comprendre le caractère progressif de ces concepts et travailler à ce qu’ils n’entrent pas en totale confrontation avec les préceptes de la société industrielle actuelle. Nous sommes face à une obligation de résultat, face à la responsabilité de parvenir à une révolution pacifique. Suis-je confus?

Une importante particularité de la culture et plus largement du régime du droit d’auteur, que l’on peut aisément qualifier d’anomalie, est que le créateur n’est pas rémunéré au moment de sa création, mais au moment de l’usage de celle-ci. Il s’agit d’un régime artisanal et non d’un régime de production industriel. L’artisan créateur ne peut contrôler que la mise à disposition initiale. Le compositeur n’est pas un salarié et son travail n’est pas la propriété de tiers qui peuvent faire valoir leur droits sur celui-ci. Le compositeur n’est pas un musicien et son travail n’est pas encadré par un contrat de travail ou par la loi sur le statut de l’artiste. En ce qui me concerne, je considère le travail artistique comme précurseur de ce que Rifkin nomme le tiers secteur, celui de l’économie sociale. J’estime aussi que ce que l’on appelait jusqu’à tout récemment les industries culturelles constituait une mauvaise lecture, une dérive de l’interprétation du rôle qu’incarne l’artisan créateur et le travailleur autonome dans l’économie de la culture : son assise première.

Faute de plus de temps pour écrire et parce que cette élection a lieu dans une semaine, je me dis que finalement, il y a une chose à dire et j’emprunte pour cela une citation de Wikipedia qui résume la pensée de Rifkin…

«… il faut dans un nouveau contrat social partager le travail existant (semaine de 30 h de travail) et compenser les emplois perdus (que le secteur marchand ne suffit plus à fournir) en développant un « tiers-secteur » non-marchand susceptible d’occuper les demandeurs d’emplois alors que le secteur public tend à s’alléger pour ne pas handicaper la compétitivité des économies. Ce tiers-secteur serait le secteur de l’économie sociale et solidaire (associations, ONG sur le modèle de l’« économie sociale » à la française selon Dominique Méda). En tout état de cause, le progrès technique et la mondialisation ne permettront pas d’assurer le plein emploi; Rifkin suggère donc l’instauration d’un revenu de base». https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Rifkin

Ce revenu de base c’est le régime français des intermittents du spectacle, qu’il faut élargir à l’ensemble du spectre des travailleurs autonomes québécois.

Discoverability allows the retrieval of content of which we know the existence and the discovery of content we did not knew about. (Metadata State of the Art / État des lieux des métadonnées du secteur culturel, Observatoire de la culture et des communications, Institut de la statistique du Québec, 2017)

Discoverability holds tensions and contradictions. We wish it to be inclusive and to support access to the whole world of content, we also want it to be targeted at specific consumers based on profiling and on competitive reasons. Libraries sees it one way, corporations another way and governments are stuck in the middle trying to regulate access and market restrictions.

Linked Open Data advocators and Private recommendations bots are kind of forced to work together in a coopetitive dynamic in order to make the World a better place to live. How do IT, librarians and the Entertainment industry can collaborate to connect data and take advantage of the 4th industrial revolution?

Josée Plamondon — Semantic Web specialist (Serendipité — Montreal)

Cédric Claquin — Trans-media recommendation (1DLab/Divercities — Marseille)

Paul Jessop — ISNI Unique identifier (ISNI-IA — London)

MODERATOR — Jean-Robert Bisaillon (metaD — Montreal)

Panel is introduced by Jean-Robert Bisaillon who welcomes the audience and participants to the panel. He then cites the two prong definition of discoverability taken from recent study by the Quebec Statistical Institute : “Discoverability allows the retrieval of content of which we know the existence and the discovery of content we did not knew about.” 1. Routhier, C. et al. État des lieux sur les métadonnées relatives aux contenus culturels. (2017). at http://www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/statistiques/culture/etat-lieux-metadonnees.pdf Discoverability is empowered by rich metadata which allows for retrieval and recommendation of creative content in the digital domain as well as remuneration of the creators of such digital content deriving from its usage by consumers on platforms.

First panelist is Paul Jessop from the International Standard Name Identifier International Agency (ISNI-IA). ISNI is a numerical ID (16 digits) allowing the allocation of unique ID to individuals, organizations and fictional characters involved in creative content of any nature. Mr. Jessop presents a deck of slides. ISNI is a standard published by ISO (International Standard Organization) in Geneva, based on a large industrial consensus. ISNI identifies public parties such as individuals, organizations such as groups, ensembles, orchestras but also corporations, labels, publishers, and finally fictional characters such as Jerry Mouse who used to dance with Gene Kelly. Why is this useful? One example is the case of Jimmie Rodgers, where you would have conflicts between both the country singer who died in 1933 and the pop singer born in 1933. If you go to the TIDAL service and look for Jimmie Rodgers, you will find a mishmash of the two of them (https://listen.tidal.com/search/albums/Jimmie%20Rodgers). When you can actually visually distinguish both its no big deal, but when you ask an automatic engine to build a playlist you need a tool to do so. As a music industry we need to get names registered. To do so you have to contact a registrar (http://www.isni.org/content/isni-registration-agencies / http://isnimusic.com). We then need to associate content , music, works, with those ISNIs — make sure metadata is associated. This can be done by creators, publishers and producers of such content. ISNI doesn’t solve the problem of discoverability but it does provide a tool to do so. The main characteristics of ISNI is that its open and that someone can search the database easily (http://www.isni.org/search), there is an API so machines can query it, for some reasons some identifiers have been reluctant to let machine tap into their database, but this one is open. ISNI is also connected to VIAF (Virtual International Authority File / Fichier d’autorité international virtuel — https://viaf.org/) managed by the OCLC cooperative and which is connected to the world’s library community. Things have to interoperate in this fashion or else we can’t build systems.

Second panelist is Josée Plamondon from Sérendipité in Montreal. She is a digital librarian and specialist of the Semantic Web. She presents a deck of slides and introduces the concept of Answer Engines and Vocal Search redefining our comprehension of Search Engines. She will address the mechanisms of interoperability between systems to communicate, semantically, technically and both at the same time. Most of our systems were built before the Internet on computers that for many reasons were not made to communicate between each other. Business reasons, locking vendors, using proprietary languages and technological environments to keep customers within our range. The Internet arose with web pages built on open standards. So my work is now based on this type of logic, on the notions of linked data and open linked data. Our machines are now looking for sense, for meaning. Metadata must be understandable for machines that are looking to make sense out of the massive data they’re harvesting. Notably by search and recommendation engines which are now becoming answer engines. Traffic is now driven by mobile, small screen at close to 80%. Search engines are looking for information to aggregate and present on the top or right of your computer screen and in small widgets or graphs (knowledge card) which will appear before the organic link results list on your mobile devices. Such aggregation of information is possible because there is metadata in the proper format underlying the process. Information about creators name, birth date, birth location, works and such, must be formatted for machines to read and make sense. If you search for “concerts in Montreal” you will now get an automatically generated knowledge card of which concerts who have improper data will be left out. SEO (search engine optimization) was used for a long time to have you show up in the first page of Google results. Nowadays you must appear in the knowledge cards. We rely on machines to make suggestions, to curate our choices more than ever. Plamondon also introduced the fact that screens are now disappearing and search is relying more and more on voice activation and voice response. She shows the example of Mattel’s Aristotle AI ‘nanny’ speaker which can answer questions, order diapers but has no screen to show results. She mentions Amazon’s Alexa activated Echo devices which powers on line shopping. Those monitors are constantly switched on and listen to your environment to try to anticipate your customer needs. These machines rely on metadata to understand human speech properly. They are learning machines. Google is doing the same and offers testing tools to analyze and help correct semantic web structured annotations attached to recipes, events, films, music, book stores and the likes. As long as you control your Web pages you can add such Schema consortium annotations to them and increase answering power around your content. These tools are the first steps towards semantic Web usage but one must remember he is captive of those companies once he adopts their models. Linked Open Data would on the contrary promote more universal standards, and we must work to understand those alternative models as well. Your content now needs to be on the Web and linked as opposed as being under the Web and in data silos. Making sure you have proper Wikipedia pages built around your artist identity is an easy way to connect to the Linked Open community. Same applies to MusicBrainz which contributes to the LOD community. The Centre National du Cinéma in France has empowered the movie community in the same fashion, making sure all the people involved in the industry actually share their knowledge together. When you use rich and complete metadata properly you can than leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to build proper recommendation engines. This is what people need in the face of the massive offer available on the networks. Companies also need to understand that without adopting such practices, all their promotion efforts will vanish in the dark very fast, being replaced constantly by new offerings.

Third panelist is Cédric Claquin who has founded the 1DLab cooperative (http://en.1d-lab.eu/) and is developing the Divercities mobile recommendations tool and application bridging geolocation, music, gaming, reading and lifestyle. They are also proposing 1DTouch a B2B2C platform offering independent and niche recordings, paying higher rates trough partnership with public libraries. The company is also working on mood related recommendations. They recently realized small independent artists had very poor metadata which is a shame since listeners won’t mind listening to an unknown artist if the song fits the right mood, situation or need. In order to leverage these findings, the company is now building its own knowledge base called Discover-It which links relevant information across different cultural propositions like video games, music and comics which are often tied together in people’s minds. They use their own algorithms starting from a spectral analysis of the music linked to the recommendation, they apply natural speech analysis on the lyrics and can connect this to concepts, moods, places, public characters and the like.

HUB Montreal would like to thank the 66th France-Quebec Permanent Commission for supporting the travelling expenses of Cédric Claquin.

L’orientation 2 qui prévoit de Façonner un environnement propice à la création ne fait pas mention du rôle du droit d’auteur comme incitatif premier. La question du droit d’auteur n’est abordé qu’en orientation 4.1 comme pilier du développement économique et des investissements culturels. Pour moi, il est important que le droit d’auteur soit abordé comme pré-requis dans la définition même d’un environnement créatif. Cette erreur est à mon sens dû à l’incompréhension persistante de la distinction à faire entre créateurs et interprètes, qualifiés indifféremment d’artistes. L’orientation 2.5, qui porte sur l’amélioration socioéconomique des artistes, est muette sur le rôle du droit d’auteur et des droits voisins actuellement menacés par les pratiques des grandes plateformes numériques — pensons à Facebook qui n’opère pas avec des licences d’exécution publique.

L’orientation 4 est plutôt claire sur les possibilités de développement économique par la culture, mais elle est silencieuse sur le rôle fondamental des collectifs de gestion comme pilier de ce développement. Les collectifs de gestion et associations sectorielles ne sont pas cités à juste titre, alors que l’on nomme abondamment les entreprises culturelles, le milieu des affaires et les industries créatives comme moteurs. La rétribution des titulaires de droits est rapidement abordé en section 4.6, qui aborde aussi l’usage des métadonnées. La formulation proposée : «il faut également envisager une meilleure organisation de l’information sur la gestion des droits d’auteur et des droits voisins.» — ne me semble pas claire et minimise les efforts déployés actuellement par les collectifs de gestion.

Cela dit, le fait d’avoir identifié les métadonnées comme facteur clé pour la survie de notre culture et de notre souveraineté numérique est un excellent pas dans la bonne direction. Bon forum !

Jean-Robert Bisaillon

http://metad.media/

►Create/Produce ►Tag/Declare ►Distribute ►CONSUME ►Measure ►Pay Royalty

1. Assign proper credit to rights holders and creative contributors : a digital musical sound recording is just meaningless orphan binary data if it does not embed or link itself to rights holders, contributors and descriptive information allowing context to emerge, account statement and accurate royalty payment.

Concerned are all lyricists, composers, publishers, performers and musicians, producers, music producers, recording studios, record labels, etc. Public policy supporting the production of original content should make sure those content are properly tagged (Embedded Metadata — Blockchain) before entering the commercial value chain to allow optimal exploitation and return on investment.

The lack of mechanical licenses looms as a major liability for streaming services, and the publishers’ association estimates that as much as 25 percent of the activity on these platforms is unlicensed… Spotify countered that it lacked the data to sort out which publishers had legitimate claims over songs, or even how to locate all the parties… NY Times

2. Intellectual propriety assets and contributors must be tied to unique standard iD’s. ISRC, ISWC, IPI, ISTC, IPN, ISAN, EIDR, ISNI are either ISO or industrial standards allowing tracing, disambiguation or machine to machine processes and must be used.

Most type of contributor or rightsholder can be linked to a specific unique identifier. These codes document the whole value chain flowchart and can allow better automated automatch processes.

3. Creative content metadata should include geolocation information with regards to several place of creation, place of birth, place of location of head office and the like. It will allow geolocation within recommendation and several other useful tasks. ISO3166–1, ISO3166–2, UN-LOCODE or .kml (Keyhole Markup Language) should be used when possible.

4. Production companies, digital agregators and content users should adopt DDEX international electronic data interchange (EDI) standards and Message Suite Standards allowing dissemination of metadata : RIN (Recording Information Notification), ERN (Electronic Release Notification), MLC (Music Licensing Companies), DSR (Digital Sales Reporting).

5. Whenever possible or sometimes necessary, Canadian stakeholders should participate in digital trans-national standard definition and engage time and efforts at tables such as : UNESCO, CISAC, ISO, DDEX, ICANN, NCUC, ISOC, W3C-RDF or IETF.

6. The music industry must rebuild confidence between rights holders and the public, improve content discoverability based on recommendation algorithm, improve access to rich descriptive data often lost in the digital shift, engage efforts in building the semantic Web. We must allow CanCon to thrive!

TGiT is a Canadian start-up project and software built to empower creators, performers, publishers and record labels. TGiT allows “tagging at the source” for stakeholder and rightsholder. Art should never be anonymous!

We are also a bilingual digital culture watch on Delicious, Scoop.it and under hashtag #musicmetadata

APEM — Évangéline
Artisti (UDA)
Auddly
Audiam
AWAL — Kobalt Music Group
Bandcamp
Bandzoogle
BAnQ (Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec)
Believe Digital
Blitzr

BNF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France)
CD Baby
CD1D — 1DTouch
CISAC — Common Information System (CIS) — Common Search Index (CSI) — Common Works Registration (CWR) — International Standard Recording Code (ISWC) — Interested Parties Information Code (IPI)
CMRRA (CSI inc.)
CONNECTmusic
DDEX (ERN — RIN)
Discogs
FACTOR Completion Report & Materials
FastTrack — CIS-Net
freeDB
Gracenote
INgrooves
International Standard Recording Code (ISRC)
International Standard Text Code (ISTC)
Internet Archives
ISNI-IA
LAC (Library & Archives Canada)
LAST.FM Audioscrobler and Artist Wiki
LyricFind
MROC
MusicBrainz
MusicMark (ASCAP, BMI)
MusicStory
MusixMatch
Nielsen Soundscan
Papineau
Paroles.net
Quantone
ROVI — allmusic (AMG)
Select Digital
SACEM
SCAPR (IPD)
simbals
SOCAN
SODRAC (CSI inc.)
SongSplits
SOPROQ
SoundCloud
SoundExchange
SoundHound
Stingray Entertainment
The Orchard
TITE-LIVE Mediabase Pro
Transparency Rights Management
tunecore
TuneSat
Vericast (BMAT)
WAVO
WorldCat
yacast

Both studies are giving a shot at defining what should be standard metadata fields for the industry. But as it’s always been, they come up with different sets and semantics to define the descriptive information everyone should adopt and provide. As always, there is an obvious lack of communication within our industry.

At TGiT I have been closely involved with several industry partners over the course of time to contribute in solving this issue. We have been involved with creators and with rightsholders at PRO level and recording industry level. We like to consider our project as being co-constructed and open-innovation. We have received public funding from the Canada Media Fund and Musicaction.

Following are the links to the above mentioned studies as well as their proposed information mapping. Finally, we offer you our own mapping and invite you to try the free TGiT B2B Music Tagger.

Bearing Point Study — Feasibility study on the creation of an open cultural data registry, (in french) (France Culture and Communications Ministry), July 2015, page 12. Short link

Name of work (Title)
Names of creators
Names of contributors
ISRC
ISWC
IPI/ISNI

Berklee Fair Music Project, Fair Music : Transparency and Payment flows in the music industry, July 2015, page 25.

Title of song played (Title)
Album
Songwriter
Musical composition copyright owner
Artist
Sound recording copyright owner
ISRC
ISWC
Duration of stream
Type of stream (on-demand, radio)
Year of release
Any special unique work identifiers promulgated by a Fair Trade NGO

Unlike other music taggers, TGiT is an open software project created with professionals with their specific needs in mind. This free software allows songwriters, composers, music publishers, performers and labels to tag and export standard data fields. It currently allows to create single songs or albums projects in MP3-ID3 tags and FLAC Vorbis Comments tags. Its easy and it will evolve. You can save and re-open projects and their associated audio files using the simple text .tgit format extension.

Our mapping includes all the fields identified by the studies mentioned in the current article, and is the following.

Track Title (Title)
Version Information
Compilation (Y/N)
Release Name (Album)
Lead Performer
Lead Performer ISNI and Country of origin
Contributors (Guest Performers, Lyricist, Composer, Publisher, Label Name, Producer, Mixer, Recording Studios, Featured Guests)
Contributors ISNI (coming soon)
ISRC
ISWC
Recording Time
Release Time
Original Release Time
Catalog Number
Barcode
Primary Style
Attached Pictures (cover art, booklet, etc.)
Lyrics
Language
Track Number and Total Tracks (e.g. 2/9)
User tags
User comments