Eric Baptiste, QwantumRights Solutions CEO and Cofounder.
Data quality in the music business is no longer just an administrative concern — it’s a revenue issue. When repertoire and rights information is incomplete, inconsistent, or poorly reconciled across the ecosystem, royalties get delayed, misallocated, or missed altogether.
This article comes from QwantumRights Solutions, a partner of DMN.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: a company can have sophisticated systems, experienced staff, and long-standing relationships with collective management organizations (“CMOs”), and still be leaving money on the table. Receiving regular royalty statements doesn’t mean the underlying data is complete, current, or consistently reflected across the global rights-management ecosystem.
In one engagement, QRS reviewed a client’s musical works repertoire as registered with their business partners and uncovered thousands of incorrect entries with direct revenue loss implications. Partner databases showed misidentified creators and publishers, incorrect ownership shares, and conflicting versions of the same works, creating widespread fragmentation and undermining accurate royalty collection. Working with the client, QRS corrected the underlying data and process flows, resulting in measurable revenue uplift.
That kind of gap doesn’t surface as one large missing cheque. It accumulates quietly, across thousands of works, until an unexplained shortfall finally forces someone to ask why.
Why This Isn’t Just an IT Problem
The industry has made real progress on metadata standards and identifiers. But better systems don’t automatically produce better outcomes if the business relationships, responsibilities, and data flows behind them remain unclear. A musical work sits inside a network of writers, publishers, CMOs, administrators, labels, and digital services — and assuming errors will be corrected downstream is a dangerous bet. By the time a shortfall is noticed, the problem may have existed for years.
That’s why a meaningful repertoire analysis can’t be treated as a technical review. It has to examine how rights are administered, licensed, reported, reconciled, and converted into royalty payments — and it can’t be a one-time exercise. Data degrades through normal business processes, no foul play required, which means data verification needs to happen regularly, especially for major catalogues.
Why We Do This Differently
QRS was built by professionals who have spent their careers working with CMOs and developing international data standards. We are not generalist consultants; our expertise is deeply specialized in rights management, data, and the organizations and systems that underpin them. I spent over 20 years leading CISAC and later chairing its board through SOCAN; together with colleagues at BIEM, IFPI, and RIAA, we launched what became DDEX at MidemNet 2001. Two of my QRS colleagues, Terry Boissonneault and Janice Scott, were key architects and implementers of those same CISAC data-exchange standards inside a major CMO. Diane Petrucci and Gilles Daigle bring the financial and legal lens that ties data quality directly to revenue and risk.
That combination matters because rights management connects strategy, legal relationships, financial controls, operations, and technology — and a problem in one dimension rarely reveals its full cost when viewed in isolation. A data issue may have a technical cause but a financial consequence; a royalty discrepancy may trace back to a copyright ownership question. Solving these problems requires the same range of disciplines that created them.
From Diagnosis to Action
A good repertoire data analysis doesn’t stop at a list of errors. It should help an organization prioritize what to fix, determine whether the fix requires new technology, better process, or engagement with CMOs, publishers and sub-publishers, and support implementation of the fix. Through our Insight consulting practice, QRS works across business strategy, audit, finance, and technology to connect the diagnosis to the environment that created it — because technology should serve the business, not the other way around.
Music is increasingly global, catalogues change hands, and new forms of exploitation keep raising fresh questions about ownership and attribution. In that environment, the real question isn’t whether an organization has data — it’s whether that data is helping or quietly working against that organization’s ability to collect the revenue it’s owed.
If your catalogue is valuable, your data deserves the same scrutiny as any other revenue-generating asset.
However, fixing faulty data means engaging the appropriate stakeholders such as CMOs, publishers, sub-publishers, and others who actually have to implement the corrections — and that’s often where repertoire data audits stall. QRS has established relationships with dozens of key industry players around the world, which means we don’t just hand a client a report and wish them luck. We work with them to resolve the issues.
We Do Much More Than Investigate Data
That same network extends well beyond repertoire audits. QRS’s leadership has operated at the highest levels of the international music industry for decades — experience that translates directly into practical results for clients. For example, we have guided a new performing rights organization through its launch, and we regularly help clients navigate CMO’s and CISAC’s rules, procedures, and institutional relationships resulting in increased revenue— terrain that can be genuinely difficult for an outsider to work through alone.
We also support organizations that are new to the industry and still shaping their strategy around revenue identification for asset creators. Across several engagements in multiple countries, QRS has helped emerging players understand the dynamics of the rights‑management ecosystem. We evaluate the technical foundations of their products, and provide recommendations to pivot their strategy, offerings and operational systems to better identify, track, and deliver revenue to creators. Through targeted strategic guidance and technical product reviews, QRS has enabled these organizations to strengthen their service models and achieve significantly improved outcomes for the creators they serve.
The QRS Team
QRS brings together more than 150 years of combined experience across copyright administration, finance, technology, operations, and legal strategy.
Eric Baptiste, President, spent over 30 years at the intersection of creative industries and collective rights management, including as CEO of SOCAN (2010–2020) and Director General, then Board Chair, of CISAC (respectively 1998–2010 and 2014-2019).
Terry Boissonneault, CTO, has 30+ years developing copyright-management systems and two decades in CISAC’s industry standard-setting work.
Janice Scott, COO, brings 40+ years in IT, information security, and operational transformation, most recently as COO of Dataclef (a SOCAN company) and VP of IT at SOCAN.
Diane Petrucci, CFO, is an accountant and auditor with 30+ years in private and public practice, including as chief auditor and CFO at SOCAN.
Gilles M. Daigle, Strategic Advisor, was General Counsel and Head of Legal Services at SOCAN (2013–2019) after 23 years in private practice at Gowlings.
Eric Baptiste is President of QwantumRights Solutions (QRS), a Toronto-based consultancy specializing in rights management, royalty administration, and data management for organizations in the creative industries.