SOCAN Ambitions Go Global With Dataclef

By David Farrell

The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada’s latest expansion underscores the PRO’s ambition to become a global leader as a one-stop show for licensing, data mining and rights payments.

Launched this week, its new services arm called Dataclef promises one-stop licensing, data tracking and royalty reporting drawn from a proprietary music rights database spanning 200 territories around the globe.

"Dataclef is a milestone for SOCAN and the music industry on a global level," says SOCAN Group CEO Eric Baptiste. "For the first time ever, organizations can go to one place for state-of-the-art license administration, worldwide reporting, and intelligent royalty tracking and delivery, improving their efficiency and bottom-line to return superior results."

To ensure client confidentially and privacy, SOCAN's services team, led by Dataclef CEO & Head of Sales Janice Scott, will operate at arm's length from SOCAN's core business teams and on segregated systems at the PRO’s Valleybrook Drive HQ in Don Mills, ON. Dataclef’s menus now in French and English will be expanding to support Spanish and Arabic in the coming months, a company official advises.

The new business follows acquisition deals with Audiam, MediaNet, Royalty Guru, and SODRAC in the past 24 months, with each operating as stand-alone firms with separate P&Ls.

Concurrent with the announcement, SOCAN has announced the signing of a deal with the Indian Performing Rights Society Limited (IPRS), for Dataclef to provide back-office services through its Dataclef Suite of products and services.

In May of this year, SOCAN struck a services deal with the newly formed Dutch Caribbean performing rights organization, Ducapro, which will now be served by Dataclef.

Globally, there are more than 90 performing rights orgs, many of which SOCAN presumably will be working with to sell its expanding list of arms-length services, including the Dataclef suite of tools.