Photo Credit: NMPA Annual Meeting 2024
Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl says metadata issues make the industry more susceptible to AI in his NMPA meeting keynote: “It takes the teeth out of things.”
Metadata problems have been a continual thorn in the side of music rights holders for the last two decades. When performing rights organizations (PROs) can’t accurately match a track’s metadata to its use, artists and their contributors miss out on hard-earned revenue. Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl wants to bring those issues to light for the industry to solve, and he’s got some suggestions for going about it.
At the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA)’s Annual Meeting in New York on Wednesday (June 12), Kyncl was interviewed by NMPA President and CEO David Israelite, during which the Warner exec was asked for his views on positive reform in collection societies.
“One of the things that troubles me personally is that we’re basically collecting digital revenue the way we’ve collected analog revenue for decades. The speed of it; everything is the same,” said Kyncl. “That’s something we all collectively can do better and I think that will help songwriters tremendously.”
“There’s a wealth of repertoire ownership information that sits with the collection societies, PROs, the [Mechanical Licensing Collective] and not everything matches perfectly,” he explained, calling for the industry to enable collection societies worldwide to collaborate in order to solve the continued issue of unmatched data.
Kyncl stressed that reducing the amount of mismatched data is “incredibly important, not only for a faster flow of money today,” but for the music industry down the road as AI technology continues to grow. “If we set the rules of the road correctly with the platforms, it will have to depend on ownership information,” he added. “It’s one of the things that we really need to focus on.”
Israelite also asked Kyncl to comment on issues plaguing songwriters in the age of artificial intelligence. Kyncl, who has been notably outspoken on AI, said that Warner has “two main goals” regarding AI, “one of which is protection,” and “growing the pie and figuring out positive use cases [for AI].”
“Those two can coexist next to each other, but we have to pursue both and that’s what [Warner is] doing,” said Kyncl. “This is a very clear focus. If we don’t get this right, we risk human creativity being replaced by machines, which obviously is not a world everybody wants to live in.”
“If you believe in the things that I mentioned before — the work that we’re doing on increasing the pie, increasing participation on the pie, and setting the roadmap on AI with the largest corporations in the world — it takes a whole different level of sophistication and systems and understanding things,” he concluded.
