Licence Compliance and Usage Reporting to Collecting Societies for Music Licensees

In short: Music licences require licensees to report the music they use to collecting societies such as PROs, mechanical rights organizations and neighbouring rights societies. The Noctil Platform turns a licensee's own usage logs into complete, society-ready usage reports. It matches and enriches each line against more than 55 million musical works and 300 million sound recordings, produces each society's required format, delivers reports through the society's API or SFTP server, and tracks acknowledgements and deadlines, so the licensee stays compliant without a manual reporting team.

Report every song you use, to every society, in the format each one requires. For music licensees, such as broadcasters, digital services, fitness, gaming, karaoke and background music providers, that must report music usage to collecting societies under their licences.

The Situation

Broadcasters, streaming and digital services, fitness and gaming platforms, karaoke and background music providers all hold licences from collecting societies to use music. Those licences come with reporting obligations: the licensee must report what it used, when and how often, so the societies can pay the right songwriters, publishers, performers and rights owners.

A licensee operating in several territories may report to many societies at once, including PROs, mechanical rights organizations and neighbouring rights societies, each with its own format, schedule and rules.

The Problem

Meeting those obligations is a growing operational burden:

• Thin usage data. A licensee’s own logs usually hold little more than a title and an artist, while societies need writers, publishers, identifiers and recording details to match and distribute.
• A different format for every society. Each society defines its own report layout, fields and validation rules.
• Many deadlines. Reports are due on different schedules for each society and licence, and late or missing reports put the licence at risk.
• Rejections and queries. Incomplete or incorrect reports are rejected or queried, and every correction takes time.
• Audit exposure. Licensees need a clear record of what was reported, when, and what each society acknowledged.
• Manual effort. Building, checking and sending reports by hand doesn’t scale as usage volumes and territories grow.

The Solution

The Noctil Platform turns a licensee’s usage logs into compliant, society-ready reports.

1. Ingest usage logs with DataFort. Play logs, streaming reports and usage exports are loaded and normalized, whatever their source format.
2. Match and enrich with MatchIQ. Each line is matched against more than 55 million musical works and 300 million sound recordings, and enriched with writers, publishers, identifiers such as ISWC and ISRC, and recording details.
3. Society-specific reports. DataFort produces each society’s required format, applying its fields and validation rules before delivery.
4. Automated delivery and acknowledgements. Reports are delivered through each society’s API or SFTP server. Acknowledgements are retrieved automatically, on a schedule or through callback APIs, so the status of every report is always up to date.
5. Schedules and deadlines with ProcessEngine. ProcessEngine runs each society’s reporting cycle on its own schedule, flags reports that are due or overdue, and routes rejections back for correction.
6. A complete audit trail. Every report, delivery and acknowledgement is recorded, so the licensee can show exactly what it reported, to whom and when.

The Result

• Licence compliance maintained, with every report delivered on schedule to every society
• Fewer rejections and queries, because reports are enriched and validated before delivery
• No manual reporting team, with reports built, sent and tracked automatically
• Audit-ready records of every report and acknowledgement
• Better relationships with societies and rightsholders, through complete, accurate usage data