Semantics for the Music Industry: the Development of the Music Business Ontology (MBO) Frank Schumacher Ronny Gey Stephan Klingner University of Leipzig University of Leipzig University of Leipzig Augustusplatz 10 Augustusplatz 10 Augustusplatz 10 04109 Leipzig, Germany 04109 Leipzig, Germany 04109 Leipzig, Germany +49 3419732256 +49 3419732256 +49 3419732278 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] leipzig.de ABSTRACT Due to legal specifics of the music industry such as copyrights or In the paper we show the development of the Music Business royalties and the corresponding heterogeneous international struc- Ontology (MBO). The MBO was developed in reaction to prob- tures administrative tasks in general have an inherent complexity. lems towards data and communication in the music industry. As smaller stakeholders often lack financial capacities, an effec- Based on a qualitative pre-study we analyzed the music industry, tive, domain specific software supporting these tasks is not avail- its players and data and software in use. First, we identified typi- able for the majority of players. This results in manifold manual cal services and data formats. Consequently, we extracted con- and time-consuming activities, limiting productivity and quality. cepts and properties from the music business. The development of The changing value chain, the new worldwide distribution chan- software tools for the music business serving well-defined tasks nels and multitude of options regarding devices and services [3] followed the design of the ontology. As a result, the MBO in- therefore require efficient and effective software solutions for the creases transparency of the music business as well as it serves for management of music data. It is important to ensure that new a better understanding of the music business itself among its solutions are also affordable for small players and can be integrat- actors. The introduction of the Music Business Ontology changes ed seamlessly into the existing IT-infrastructure. the way actors and systems in the music business interact with The open as well as structuring concepts of the Semantic Web each other. It decreases the need for different interfaces and for- provide the necessary flexibility and capabilities to overcome the mats and thus considerably reduces complexity. heterogeneity of the domain without the need of establishing a standard. Rather an open, common language shall be introduced, Categories and Subject Descriptors which is free to use and can be extended by all players. Therefore, E.2 [Data Storage Representation]: Linked representations. we propose the Music Business Ontology (MBO) as a solution for the current challenges of the music industry. H.3.5 [Online Information Services]: Web-based services. Our aim is to present an overall approach, containing the method- J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Performing arts. ology of identifying domain-specific challenges, the deduction of an adequate technical basis and the presentation of prototypical General Terms tools as possible solutions of these challenges. Management, Documentation, Standardization. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present the Keywords results of a qualitative analysis of the music industry. Second, the music business ontology, ontology development, ontology dis- MBO as a solution is presented. To be able to specify general semination, music industry findings and to deduce and develop adequate solutions, we ap- plied the following methodical approach, consistent with the 1. INTRODUCTION structure of the paper. First a qualitative analysis was conducted, The digitalization has led to many disruptive changes in the music consisting of various interviews with domain experts to identify industry, resulting in a multitude of challenges. Whereas mainly and specify the major challenges of the music industry. The re- traditional distribution channels (physical, radio) were used by a sults are described in chapter 2. To identify concepts relevant for few major players in the past, the market is much more fragment- the MBO, a multitude of technical standards were analyzed (see ed nowadays. Digitalization of production, marketing and distri- Chapter 3). Based on the results chapter 4 describes the main bution processes of music favored the emergence of a multitude of concepts of the MBO as our proposed solution for the challenges internet-based distribution services and marketing channels [1], of digitalization in music business processes. To illustrate its used by many, often small and independent players [2]. practical use, Chapter 5 introduces various supporting tools based on the MBO. Chapter 7 concludes the paper. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for 2. QUALITATIVE APPROACH personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are To ensure openness and objectivity towards our research subject, not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that we decided to approach our field of study in a qualitative and copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy explorative manner [4]. This first step was driven by our interest otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, to identify the inherent actors of the music industry, to explore the requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Semantics’14, September 4–5, 2014, Leipzig, Germany. music industry specific processes, to highlight the power relation- Copyright 2010 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0010 …$15.00. ships and networks of the different actors and to discover the technologies in use in terms of software, data formats and stand- 3. TECHNICAL APPROACH ards. Our goal was to identify the issues the music industry is Based on the described situation in the music business, we chose confronted with nowadays - generally and with a focus on techno- to start the development of a standard data schema as a common logical issues in the realm of software and data formats. ground for future developments of software tools. As a suitable Between October 2013 and June 2014, we conducted eight quali- solution for data representation, we chose to base our strategy on tative expert interviews [5] based on a semi-structured question- the semantic web technology [7] by developing an ontology for naire. We interviewed employees and owners of labels and pub- the music business. Ontologies are considered as a formal specifi- lishers, mostly small and medium sized companies (SMEs). Fur- cation of a shared conceptualization [8]. An ontology forms the thermore, we interviewed representatives of collecting societies heart of any system of knowledge representation for that domain and the organization of independent music organizations (VUT - [9]. The starting point of our understanding of a shared conceptu- Verband unabhängiger Tonträgerunternehmen) in Germany. We alization of the music business is based on the interviews and asked the interviewees about their daily work processes, about workshops we conducted in our qualitative study. Thereby, we their communication patterns, and about their network of clients could get an overview of the common actors, of legal, profession- and suppliers. These questions were followed by the collection of al and commercial institutions of the music market as well as issues they are struggling with in their daily work. Finally, we common software, communication channels or interfaces used in asked the interviewees question about software tools they are the music industry. using and the issues around the use of the software. Subsequently, Regarding software and the interfaces between information sys- the interview material (audio recordings) was transcribed. To tems, the interviewees mentioned numerous software tools they complete, detail and discuss the findings, we organized two work- are actually using or at least are aware of. In a second step, we shops with the interviewees: a label specific and a publisher used this information to start exploring software, data standards specific workshop. Primary goal of the workshops was to analyze and application programming interfaces (API) currently in use in the actual working processes in the organizations with a special the music industry. While researching their websites we could get focus on communication, data and (software) tools. The interview information from most of the software developers or service transcriptions and the results of the workshops were then forward- providers. Amongst others we included services like Jamendo, ed into an analysis following the grounded theory approach [6]. If MusicBrainz, Zebralution, Phononet, MusicScout, Echonest or necessary, we conducted further interviews during the analysis Gracenote in our analysis. Further, we were fortunate to cooperate phase to strengthen our argumentation by focusing on detailed with the German collecting societies GEMA and GVL by consult- questions, which arose in the former interviews. ing their data formats and diverse application forms for artist or Our data analysis showed several results. First of all, labels and work registration. publishers nowadays are confronted with a growing amount of After the identification of the different services and data formats possible business models and revenue channels. Our interviewees available, we analyzed each of them in order to develop a seman- reported that today’s distribution channels are manifold. In addi- tic vocabulary, which is based