In the mid-to-late ’60s, my older brothers played in two bands – Storm Center, a rock cover band, and Honey Bear, a sludgy psychedelic quartet. I’d tag along to rehearsals, totally transfixed – especially by the drummers. Not long after, my sister played Tapestry on repeat, and two other brothers sat me in the middle of four towering speakers hooked up to their quad Sansui 9090DB Stereo Receiver so I could hear Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein drums swirl around the room. Those early moments marked the beginning of lifelong passions – for music listening, for drums, and eventually for helping creators navigate today’s increasingly complex rights landscape.
The More Things Change…
Throughout my career, I’ve observed a fascinating pattern: every time a new creation or distribution technology emerges, our industry immediately prophesies its own demise.
Remember when cassette tapes were going to destroy the music business? Record companies went so far as to print skulls and crossbones on vinyl inner sleeves with ominous warnings about the dangers of home taping. Fast forward to today, and that panic seems quaint compared to the challenges posed by AI and emerging media.
Our Music Services division brings together a powerhouse lineup of companies and services to support every corner of the music ecosystem — from creators and publishers to labels and platforms. Whether it’s tech, licensing, or back-end admin, we’re the behind-the-scenes pros helping the industry run smoothly
At Music Services, we’ve learned to recognize and manage these cycles of disruption and adaptation. They follow a remarkably consistent pattern: massive technological disruption, followed by heated debates about rights, rates, and revenue – intended to balance the interests of all contributors to the emerging ecosystem. Revenue grows, interests are balanced, investments are made, and the cycle begins anew with the next innovation.
From Piano Rolls to Algorithms
Historical perspective is crucial to understanding today’s challenges. Consider the humble piano roll from the 1890s – essentially the original “flash drive,” a physical medium storing playback instructions that could be inserted into a device to produce music. Sound familiar? From piano rolls to vinyl to MP3s to streaming services to artificial intelligence, the technical details change but the fundamental concept remains the same: instructions stored in a medium that recreate a musical experience. As the saying (often apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain) goes: history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
The piano roll controversy ultimately led to the 1909 Copyright Act’s establishing mechanical reproduction rights that remain foundational today. The Harry Fox Agency (now more commonly referred to as HFA) launched shortly after in 1927 under the Music Publishers Protective Association (the predecessor to today’s NMPA), creating the infrastructure needed to manage these rights at scale.
As of today, HFA maintains a database of over 44 million musical works on behalf of nearly 100,000 publishers. Each month, HFA processes nearly a million song registrations and updates – the majority of which are addressed in only a few weeks. But having a database isn’t the same as understanding what’s in it. These aren’t just data points—they’re songs tied to songwriters, publishers, and our culture. That’s why we don’t just maintain the data—we actively curate it, continually refining the information entrusted to us.
Back in June 1960, HFA leadership was grappling with what seemed like an enormous task: “encoding” 100,000 compositions onto “magnetic tape”. They would be unable to conceive of our current scale – from 100K compositions to 100K publishers administering 44M+ compositions. Yet here we are – proof of what decades of expertise and smart systems can achieve.
The Great Divergence
The digital revolution created what I call “The Great Divergence” – a fundamental separation between artistic creation and distribution that has had profound implications for rights management.
In the pre-digital era, record labels maintained relative end-to-end control of their value chain. They knew which bands they signed, which studios they booked, and what records they manufactured and shipped to stores. Even with independent distributors in the mix, the originating label handled rights clearance. The label really was the “platform” back then – but the world has changed.
With streaming, today’s music “platforms” aren’t originating the music. They’re distributing it. In technical speak, they receive assets and associated data from countless originators, then they must align that information with rights holders and create proper matches. This divergence spurred the creation by HFA of an entirely new administration infrastructure. With decades of experience, we connect the dots.
That’s the gap we’ve filled with Music Services, powered by Rumblefish, Audiam, and HFA. Through a combination of tech innovation and an expert staff with decades of experience, we’ve figured out how to solve tremendously complex licensing challenges. We’ve made seemingly impossible scenarios not just possible,but standardized.
Simplifying Complexity
Twenty-five years ago, the concept of individuals combining self-created videos with commercial music and distributing it to millions of people who then share it with their networks, would have posed an overwhelming rights management challenge. Identifying all appropriate rights holders, matching those who control various assets, and presenting offers describing grants of rights, territories, terms, and economics, all at scale, would have been a logistical nightmare.
Today, when companies approach us wanting to implement similar models, they often don’t realize that we invented these business processes. We made them simple for clients, even though managing the complexity behind the scenes requires tremendous expertise and infrastructure.
Our team excels at translating wide ranging conversations into cohesive narratives that rights holders can evaluate for possible participation. We navigate the often-tricky overlap of statutory and non-statutory rights in music and video, offering both standard and custom solutions backed by years of real-world experience.
While I spend considerable time thinking about emerging technologies, I’m actually less a futurist and more a pastist. I find that studying how people reacted to past disruptions often provides better guidance for navigating future challenges than speculation.
Technology changes, but human behavior seems to remain remarkably consistent. The desire to create, share, and enjoy music persists across generations, even as the tools evolve dramatically.
Some adaptations are subtle but profound. I’ve noticed my children’s two-handed thumb dexterity far exceeds mine when texting – they cradle their phones with both hands and type with both thumbs at remarkable speeds. As a drummer who’s worked on ambidexterity, I appreciate this unconscious evolution.
Will these physical adaptations eventually lead to different listening behaviors? Perhaps. Yet my own household demonstrates both continuity and change: one son explores my vinyl collection with enthusiasm, discovering Duke Ellington and sending excited notes about his finds, while another can’t bear the production aesthetics of older recordings because they differ so dramatically from the super-dry, forward mix of contemporary music he prefers.
Quality vs. Experience
The debate over audio quality illustrates another consistent theme. Remember the outcry when MP3s gained popularity? Today we see similar conversations about high-resolution audio on streaming platforms. While I personally appreciate higher quality sound (I’ve even installed a DAC between my computer and stereo), what ultimately matters most to many is the musical work itself – the genius of creation, not the delivery method.
Context profoundly shapes our experience too. When I’m 40 minutes into a VO2 max workout, I’m not analyzing the compression in the Deep Purple track playing through my fitness app. I’m using music to find the motivation to push through discomfort. The core musical work transcends its technical presentation.
The AI Frontier
Today’s frontier is undoubtedly artificial intelligence. The question of how we regulate and manage the automation and scale of what were once works of solitary creativity – now being potentially imitated or integrated into outputs by technology companies – is immensely complex.
There are inputs (what goes into AI models) and outputs (what they produce), with critical rights questions on both sides of that equation. How do we develop frameworks that respect creators while enabling innovation? These questions recall similar debates around sampling, remixing, and other technological disruptions that initially seemed to threaten established rights but ultimately led to new opportunities.
Our Ongoing Mission
Ever since my older siblings surrounded me with music, I was hooked.
At Music Services, our core mission is based on this passion. It’s simple: we exist to help create and maintain an ecosystem where those who create music are properly rewarded while enabling distributors and others to run efficient businesses.
This means constantly examining new business models, relating them to precedents when useful, anticipating future developments, applying sophisticated problem-solving tools, and helping support sustainable businesses that benefit all parties in the ecosystem – powered by Rumblefish, Audiam, and HFA.
As we face the latest wave of technological disruption, I remain optimistic. The cycle abides – to paraphrase. While the specific challenges evolve, our fundamental role as rights facilitators and problem solvers continues. By bridging the gaps between creators, technology, and commerce, we help ensure that whatever platform emerges next, the music – and the people who make it – will thrive.
