WTDaBuzz · Music Business · 17 October 2026
Music rights administration is also a data operation. Sacem’s 2025 annual report places its technology investment alongside its international reach, highlighting a business requirement that extends beyond signing repertoire.
In the report’s management discussion, Sacem says it distributed royalties to 663,000 creators and publishers worldwide in 2025. It describes investment in its URights platform to process growing volumes of data. These are Sacem’s own reported activities and management claims, rather than an independent comparison of collecting societies.
A catalogue record needs to remain usable after registration
For a publisher assessing a music licensing organization, the practical question is how the relationship supports ongoing administration. A catalogue can change through new works, corrected records and questions about existing entries.
An internal owner should know which record is current, where a change was submitted and what response remains outstanding. A spreadsheet that only records the date of first registration may not provide enough information for that continuing work.
Give unresolved questions a clear path
In a hypothetical small publishing business, a staff member might notice that a work appears under two slightly different titles in separate reports. The useful next action is to preserve the evidence and ask the appropriate administrator to investigate, rather than assuming the records are interchangeable.
A case log can identify the affected work, the documents used, the person handling the enquiry and the next follow-up point. It should distinguish a submitted query from a confirmed correction.
Evaluate service against an actual workflow
Technology claims are easier to assess when a publisher can describe a concrete task. How does the team supply a correction? What can it retrieve for review? How does it identify a question that needs human assistance?
A service demonstration built around a realistic catalogue scenario can reveal more than a broad feature list. The publisher should document the assumptions and limitations of that demonstration before generalising from it.
Sacem’s report shows the scale at which rights administration and technology intersect. For an individual business, the actionable issue is whether its own catalogue processes produce clear records, accountable enquiries and information that can be used consistently over time.
Image: Illustrative studio microphone, Jonathan Velasquez / Unsplash, standard Unsplash License. The image does not depict Sacem’s systems or offices.