PPL is a London-based music industry organisation that licences recorded music and music videos produced by record labels in the UK for use in public performances, broadcast and new media. PPL allows radio and television stations, other broadcasters and internet radio stations to legally use sound recordings and music videos in their transmissions by distributing airplay payments to the respective record company and performers. PPL’s public performance licences also allow thousands of clubs, shops, pubs, restaurants, bars and other music users to play sound recordings and music videos in public. In addition, PPL has multiple contracts with international licensing organisations to collect overseas income. In 2009, PPL collected more than £129 million and provided crucial revenues for those creative individuals and companies.
PPL forms a data hub for over 5,750 record companies and 45,000 performers in the UK. The PPL repertoire database contains over four million recordings, which grows weekly by an average of 6,500 new, electronically submitted recordings. In addition, through its 48 contracts with similar organisations around the world, it interacts with a further 4,000 record companies and 21,000 performers in many different languages and formats.
The amount of royalties PPL remits each year is increasing in response to a growing member community, an increase in material to licence and an expanding number of delivery mechanisms via social media outlets. To correctly assign and complete payments, PPL must start with accurate and standardised data on this network of members.
Historically, PPL built its own data management tools in-house. However, to keep pace with the continued expansion of the market, PPL turned to the technology expertise of DataFlux and the strategic consulting of Deloitte to build a master data management (MDM) architecture that would provide the long-term infrastructure to meet the growing needs of its constituents.
Initially, PPL implemented an enterprisewide data quality program to profile, cleanse and align the data it managed. DataFlux technology generated easy-to-understand dashboards that helped staff measure the quality of their data against PPL’s business rules.
These rules enabled PPL to standardise key text fields (such as title and main artist), tailoring DataFlux’s dictionary to music industry-specific needs. This streamlined the ability to cluster and resolve duplicate data – a key requirement for PPL, since the same recordings are often legitimately submitted from many sources. Also, a series of "trust rules" enabled the creation of "golden recordings," blending the best information from each source to create a master data store.
After integrating the data management system into the new PPL database, the company had a data quality "gateway" to protect against poor-quality data. The overall architecture is ground-breaking for this industry, managing both original and master versions of all data received as well as identifying complex relationships between recordings, rights holders, performers and related stakeholders.
The initiative took nine months from vendor selection to project completion. The teams from Deloitte and DataFlux worked closely with the PPL IT team to develop an MDM architecture designed to increase the frequency and accuracy of payments made by PPL.
"It was essential for us to develop a platform that integrates well with our existing systems and makes it easy to manage, configure and customise into the future," said Peter Leathem, executive director, PPL. "The platform we now have in place provides an advanced way to store our mission-critical information and manage our business."