• Downtown Music company, FUGA joined the VRDA in 2022

• Songtrust is the first of Downtown Music’s publishing units to join the alliance

January 2024 (New York, London, Amsterdam) – Verifi Media, a global leader in modern media rights data management services, has announced the expansion of its partnership between Downtown Music and the Verifi Rights Data Alliance (VRDA). Songtrust will be the first of Downtown Music’s publishing services to join the alliance, following Downtown Music company, FUGA in 2022. Members of the VRDA  have access to a unique set of collaborative tools for metadata exchange across music’s digital value chain while allowing each entity to maintain its own proprietary database.

The new partnership will initially see composition data from Songtrust matched thoroughly across Downtown Music’s recording catalogs and other VRDA member data. These matches will include verification of ISRC/work pairs, validation of writers, and enhancement of product and recording data to help unlock new opportunities. The move to data verification and enrichment will allow VRDA partners to better identify and tackle fraud, to settle and make royalty claims faster and easier than before, and to ultimately bring better licensing and monetization options for all parties within Downtown Music.

“This is the first time we’ve seen cross-party data matching within a single organization connected in our VRDA engine, and the initial matching and enrichment results have been remarkable. Our long-time partnership with FUGA and its clients has been growing steadily since our launch in 2020, and we are delighted to welcome Downtown Music into the VRDA to achieve even greater heights in the years to come,” says Chloe Johnson, Verifi’s Chief Client Officer

Harmen Hemminga, Vice President of Product and Services Strategy at Downtown Music also comments, “After the successful integration of FUGA and Verifi Media I am very excited to see more Downtown Music companies join the VRDA and continue to further our group’s mission to create better metadata and rights pictures across our clients’ extensive catalogs. Our combined technologies will allow us to help our clients monetize their music - both recordings and now works - more optimally and significantly speed up time-to-value and revenue recognition. We’re really looking forward to working together on creating a more efficient industry as a whole with Verifi Media and the VRDA members.”

Ken Umezaki, CEO of Verifi Media noted: “As the number of digital assets in the music industry continues to expand every day at record-breaking rates, Verifi’s mission to interconnect authoritative datasets, and to provide comprehensive and enhanced metadata for our clients continues to prove vital for the growth of the digital music markets.  Downtown Music’s expanded commitment to our partnership and the Verifi Rights Data Alliance strongly indicates the importance and sincerity of our client’s commitment to better data practices.  We are truly grateful for Downtown’s continued partnership with us.”

Companies that would like to join the VRDA can contact info@verifi.media. For more information on Verifi, visit www.verifi.media.

About Verifi Media

With offices in London, New York, and Amsterdam, Verifi Media is a global leader in modern media rights data management services focused on empowering media creators through digital data innovation. Using modern tools like graph computing and artificial intelligence, Verifi revolutionizes how media ownership and metadata is enhanced, corrected, shared and tracked across the supply chain, resulting in significantly better business decisions while enabling creators to be paid properly for their work. For more information, visit www.verifi.media.

About Downtown Music & Songtrust

Downtown Music is the business and professional services division under Downtown Music Holdings, the world’s leading music services company with over 2 million clients in over 145 countries with a catalog of over 38 million music assets in a wide variety of genres and languages. Downtown’s service offerings support creators and businesses in all facets of the music industry including music creation, publishing distribution, marketing, royalty collection, financing, accounting and payment services. Songtrust -  a part of Downtown Music’s publishing administration services alongside Downtown Music Publishing and Sheer Publishing Africa -  is the world’s largest global royalty collection platform for songwriters and music publishers