Muserk Lands on Inc. Magazine’s List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies – The Inc. 5000

Muserk Lands on Inc. Magazine’s Prestigious Annual List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies –

The Inc. 5000

No. 4 In Media, No. 779 Overall

With Three-Year Revenue Growth of 636%

 

NEW YORK, August 17, 2021Inc. Magazine today revealed that MUSERK is No. 4 in Media and No. 779 overall on its annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economy’s most dynamic segment—its independent small businesses. Intuit, Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Patagonia, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees on the Inc. 5000.  Not only have the companies on the 2021 Inc. 5000 been very competitive within their markets, but this year’s list also proved especially resilient and flexible given 2020’s unprecedented challenges.

“Being named to the Inc. 5000 list is an honor for the entire Muserk Team.  There has been a lot of blood sweat and tears poured into this company from a passionate team of people who believe in the important mission of getting creators paid, so it’s deeply gratifying to be recognized for everyone’s hard work. We’d also like to extend our congratulations to all the other organizations that made the list. We are in great company,” said CEO and Founder Paul Goldman. 

“The 2021 Inc. 5000 list feels like one of the most important rosters of companies ever compiled,” says Scott Omelianuk, editor-in-chief of Inc. “Building one of the fastest-growing companies in America in any year is a remarkable achievement. Building one in the crisis we’ve lived through is just plain amazing. This kind of accomplishment comes with hard work, smart pivots, great leadership, and the help of a whole lot of people.” Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at www.inc.com/inc5000.

 

CONTACT:        

Bobbie Gale

MixedMediaWorks

323-363-2171

bobbie@mixedmediaworks.com

 

More about Muserk:

Muserk is an AI technology-driven administration platform. With its proprietary Blue Matter  system, Muserk has significantly impacted royalty collection in the video and music spaces and currently manages over 7 million works on all the major tech platforms (YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, etc.). Muserk’s proven technology has found millions in uncollected royalties for copyright holders around the world, delivering a 40% increase in royalties on average for its clients. Muserk has offices in New York, Tokyo, Nashville and Copenhagen.

More about Inc. 5000:

Companies on the 2021 Inc. 5000 are ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2017 to 2020. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2017. They must be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2020. (Since then, some on the list may have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2017 is $100,000; the minimum for 2020 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Growth rates used to determine company rankings were calculated to three decimal places. There was one tie on this year’s Inc. 5000.  Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.’s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

 

Cattle Not Pets

When I first heard the term “cattle not pets” it was the perfect metaphor to describe a concept I had always been aware of when developing for the cloud, but never had the words to describe. The idea that you should remove individuality from your cloud infrastructure and treat your resources as nameless and dynamic like cattle. Resources come and go all the time so there is no time to name, feed, and care for them as if they were pets.

I’m sure many of us have been somewhere that has a fleet of servers named after superheroes, Disney characters, or something exceedingly nerdy like Dr. Who villains. When we start talking about scalability, though, characters can’t be imagined fast enough. Not to mention the hand feeding required to spin up new instances of an application over and over again. As we were developing our cloud infrastructure to scale for Muserk, our first goal was to never connect directly to an instance again. This felt like a great starting point to answer the question of how do we deploy applications, manage state, and debug issues that arise. This is mostly a qualitative look at how we began to scale our operations in the early days of Muserk…. So for you super nerds out there we won’t go into detail about things like load balancing, caching, or infrastructure as code.

DEPLOYING APPLICATIONS

Probably the most important aspect of scaling is being able to deploy an application programmatically. Once we can do that everything else is just a facility. The obvious answer here is Docker. The more advanced answer involves Kubernetes or Terraform, but that’s a topic for another day. With a containerized application we can control dependencies, versions, the operating system, and any configuration that needs to be done ahead of time. So, all we need is a platform to run our container. The advantage of this is that this platform can be anything! The container will run exactly what we need, the exact same way, anywhere that can support docker. Once the process of starting one of these containers is automated, we are free to start up as many as we would like, allowing a load balancer to route traffic appropriately.

MANAGING STATE

Next there is the problem of how to manage state on a server instance that is essentially garbage. Writing to disk is out of the question because all of that information would be lost from instance to instance. Well, what about NFS? This could be a plausible solution, but too slow without provisioned IOPs (which are expensive in the cloud). Besides, we should do better!

In fact, this was the starting point for really honing our data model and forced us to come up with a first pass at some sort of ETL. As we ingest data, how do we store it so that our applications can access it in a consistent way? Once all of our data is in one place, we can use it as our Single Source of Truth. Using a database as a SSOT is its own complexity. The real lesson for managing state across a scalable infrastructure is to AVOID state when you can.

DEBUGGING ISSUES

Most commonly, the reason for needing to log into an individual instance is typically to figure out what went wrong. As resources start to scale this gets increasingly difficult anyway because an error could have occurred on any one of 4, 10, or, theoretically, n number of instances. So how do we figure out where problems are happening and how to fix them? There are all sorts of things to monitor across our applications. User experiences, resource trends, load times, are a couple of examples. Most importantly, in my opinion, are the error logs.

When an error occurs, we want to be made aware of it. At first pass you should be using a logger. A logger lets us standardize how we create new logs by assigning a category for each type of log and ordering them by severity. Some common categories include DEBUG, INFO, and ERROR. In this example, DEBUG level logs may be information that would be helpful when figuring out what happened, but not necessary to be looked through all the time. INFO-level logs are adding a bit higher severity. These are messages we may always want to see so that we can see usage in real time. ERROR logs, being the most severe, can be alerted on. We can configure our system to report when an ERROR has been logged so that we can take immediate action. We can then use the INFO and DEBUG logs to determine what happened. If we’ve done it correctly these logs will have information on the unique machine the application is running on so we can handle hardware-specific problems. Once we are collecting logs from all machines across all applications, we can begin to build dashboards around each application. Combined with usage and hardware metrics, we have a central location to view all relevant information.

I hope this was in some way helpful for thinking about your own cloud infrastructure.  As we continue to improve our architecture, we hope to have more to share. We are evolving our technology every day and are working hard to improve our ETL workflows and integrations into the substantial amount of processing we are doing with the data we generate. In the meantime, we will continue to backfill posts with what we have learned and implemented along the way of this journey into the final frontier.

Product Innovation In Music

When we think of product innovation in the music industry, much of the focus centers on new ways to create music and new ways for fans to consume it.  As far back as piano rolls, the idea of having a machine play your favorite music in your own home was amazing, this iterated into piano rolls and player modules that better captured and reproduced the nuances of a better performance (eg. dynamics, attack, etc.). Welte-Mignon brought the public Debussy playing Debussy the way Debussy intended! This natural progression can be seen throughout the industry’s history with the phonograph, radio, film, television, cassette to cd, streaming, and so on.  As new technology brought us more music to listen to, the business and administration side has always reacted with ways to properly manage and exploit rights; mechanical royalties, performance rights societies, licensing of rights for new media just to name a few. However, with all of the progress on the macro level of the business side, there is still a lot of room for innovation. The challenge is how do we productize the business and administration side of the industry with the same level of innovation that the production and consumption of music has been given? Let us explore….

What is a Product in the first place?

For the sake of this piece, let’s call a product an aggregation of parts & commodities, packaged with a brand, in order to create a usable, productive, satisfying experience, which is then sold. Huh? Maybe this is better explained with an example:

A bunch of steel, 3rd party machined parts, tires, a computer, all wheel driving system, etc. is “an aggregation of parts and commodities”that could make an SUV.

The SUV “packaged with a brand,” say Subaru, could bring us one of several Subaru SUV models which are likely creating an image in your head of who buys it and where they drive it.

The ability to drive the car (usable), to your destination, through the woods with a mountain bike on the back, in the snow with skis on the roof, to the beach with a surfboard (productive), all the while remaining content because it never fails, and you didn’t pay the price of an Audi.

So for music, a product such as the Spotify® or Apple Music® app could be described as the aggregation of: licensed music (the commodity) delivered through graphical user interface that sits on a robust tech infrastructure (some parts) that gets people to the music they want, or never knew they wanted, with ease (the brand, usability, experience, etc.). Taking any product through the same exercise starts to reveal why one is chosen over the other, why some brands are more successful than others. During product development at Muserk, we use this exercise as a means to identify the real issues at hand and begin the process of building the solutions that address them head-on. So let’s now dive into what we can do about innovation in the music business.

Don’t confuse pain points with problems

At Muserk, we remain focused on the root of industry challenges.  We strive to stop identifying broad pain points and pretend they are the problem. They are, in fact, the symptom. Instead, we break them down and arrange them within a respective process. There is no shortage in our industry of pinpointing issues in copyright, royalty collections, lack of transparency and so on. Anyone who has attended a music industry panel knows we are great at identifying issues in the industry, and that is a good thing. Unfortunately, sometimes panels can be on parity with a New York City co-op shareholder meeting where people complain about the same things as last year and offer no practical solutions. At times solutions can even be met with ire as jaded individuals equally dread both their current circumstances and the change that could do them some good. Alternatively, taking the pile of identified pain points, breaking them down to their individual problems, and arranging them in an order to identify their place within a process will uncover their effect on a crucial dependency (i.e. a very important point of failure). It is a focus on these real issues that lead us to effective solutions. For example, with personal finance “I don’t have enough money” is a problem – really a symptom – we all face at one point or another.  When broken down it is because of an income problem or spending problem. If it’s an income problem, it could be because your gross pay rate is too low, or the number of hours/days to which the rate is applied are too low. Or maybe your net pay is being affected by a wage garnishment, or another withholding. Your problem may even pivot. You might find that a pre-tax retirement contribution is affecting your net income and doesn’t support your eating out/coffee habit. You decide the compound interest over 30 years is in fact better than the convenience of not making your lunch/coffee, and your perceived income problems are in fact a spending problem. Solution: make your own damn coffee and lunch!

Let’s identify and arrange

One major pain point in the industry that we, Muserk, alleviate is:

…having no idea how much a rights holder should be making but there is a strong feeling it should be more…

This pain point  is really a symptom of a whole bunch of underlying issues embedded in a ton of processes that span across the globe. The recording and publishing industries consist of many data pipelines, supply chains, royalty streams fragmented by rights types, mediums, platforms, and licensing configurations. These royalty streams are subject to the business practices, copyright laws, and capabilities of local markets. Constantly emerging music platforms create new royalty streams with new licensing configurations, which adds complexities to an already-complex industry. So, if we are to make meaningful products to fix this let’s start to list out these big little problems that make up the overarching issue:

  1. Music is on a DSP but not being played
  2. Music isn’t attached to my artist page
  3. Not getting paid for cover versions of your songs
  4. Having no way to find ISRCs linked to your compositions
  5. It’s been a year since a release and songwriter splits have not been decided
  6. Being able to collect PRO money for radio play, but no mechanicals from DSPs
  7. Being able to collect for U.S. activity but nothing internationally
  8. Being able to collect for all activity but the U.S.
  9. Having no idea how to register your works to receive publishing money
  10. Acquiring a catalog of masters but there is no useful metadata
  11. Not getting paid for remixes
  12. Unable to find 473 works in the 22 million rows of usage data provided by a music platform

 …we could go on forever before we even mention deal terms and royalty rates which is where most everyone looks first

Start arranging

As you arrange in the order of a process, you will begin to find that one problem may be a result of another before it or it may be creating a bigger issue further down the line. For example, there may be a solution for automated global delivery of works data to help with compiling and delivering data, but that ends up efficiently populating databases around the world with incorrect information. Oops! The challenge is anticipating the potential roadblocks that may appear when fixing things in one area only to uncover issues in another.  When developing solutions in this way you soon discover that the most complex of them can be solved one issue at a time.  It is this combined with an agile approach that so many software development teams use when building. Moving on….

Fix the stuff you know, take cues from other non-music industries for everything else

Everyone agrees that a fresh perspective can uncover new and innovative ways to approach problems. Anyone who has spoken with me about this knows I am a broken record when it comes to finding solutions outside of our industry (pun kind of intended). So, with the example from above, there is a data input issue and a delivery issue; 2 steps of a much longer process. Normally, we look for solutions within our industry. However, Muserk has found that looking at industries that have great success in fixing similar issues can be quite helpful. With the data input issue think about ecommerce and the checkout process. If you have ever purchased an item online, you navigate to your shopping cart, entered an address, CC info, shipping, etc, you have completed a process that companies spend a lot of resources and money tweaking and figuring out. Companies hate abandoned shopping carts and do whatever they can to ensure you complete your purchase. If we want to ensure music metadata is accurate going into our systems, perhaps the eCom shopping cart industry is on to something in terms of design, UX/UI, information gathering, etc.. There are solutions to countless problems already solved in other industries.

Building something truly useful, and constant iteration

By now, we can all agree that rights administration consists of many linear processes that are each subject to many points of failure. It is important to always know that one improvement somewhere can amplify a deficiency elsewhere. Or that a high performance feature in one area can be rendered useless by a weak link down the chain. There’s no reason to put a jet engine in a small prop plane if it is just going to tear the whole plane apart on takeoff. At Muserk, we realize building a single feature is useless without the infrastructure to support it, a workflow in which it integrates, or the personnel to use it. MMatch, Muserk’s AI matching technology that discovers sound recording/musical work links, at proof-of-concept required a Sr. developer and a tech savvy rights manager to run; not what we would call a scalable solution. Not until there was a UI for a rights manager to input various data formats and automated steps that made MMatch’s output data usable was the technology more accessible to everyone on the team and therefore used more often. Now that productivity shot through the roof, do we stop there? No. At this point we are ready to iterate and not be outpaced by industry demand. The tech world can be harsh in this regard. A product version or feature  can go from “beta” to “deprecated/obsolete” in a handful of years or less. Once MMatch became more widely used by the team, the rights management cheered the sudden ability to complete days of work in under an hour, but understood this vast improvement shifted the bottleneck from usage discovery to staging data and the subsequent analysis that followed MMatch. It is true that days of work were gone, but why stop there? Why not apply MMatch to other use cases? Or better yet, why not make this one incredible product, one of several “parts & commodities, packaged with a brand, in order to create a usable, productive, satisfying experience?” It is at this point where product development resembles a continuous cycle or even an expansive spiral. Innovation in one area of an industry or other industry that once served as an effective stand-alone solution then becomes a lynchpin for a larger, future product.  

So let’s review. We have gone from simply airing grievances to identifying problems. From understanding these problems’ effect on the bigger picture to ideation of real solutions, and so on. The music business side of the industry has a long way to go in terms of technology, but I personally look forward to Muserk being a part of the massive amount of innovation we will see in the future and helping modernize the music industry.

Muserk VID

Announcing Muserk VID, A Joint Venture With Japan’s Video Research to Tackle Japanese Rights Management

Muserk is excited to announce that we are partnering with the Japanese marketing research company Video Research Ltd. to form Muserk VID. The “VID” standing for Video ID, we will service, manage and protect the online rights of the major broadcasters, networks, and production companies of Japan, around the world. Specifically, Muserk VID will provide services for reporting the playback status of content (including illegal videos) on various DSPs as well as provide a management platform for content rights holders in Japan.

With this joint venture and the creation of Muserk V.I.D., we expect to see less piracy of Japanese content on all platforms and an opportunity for our customers to monetize their content online through royalty collection,” said Video Research president Wataru Mochizuki in a statement. “We knew we needed a company that offered something unique to match the power of our scale for this joint venture. The passionate team at Muserk and their propriety technology M-PACTM and M-Match® make this a perfect match.

Video Research Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President and CEO: Wataru Mochizuki) was established in 1962 as the only research institution in Japan that provides TV rating data. Since then, they have provided the most advanced data such as various media data and marketing data such as surveys of television ratings and radio listening rates in Japan, and provide total support for corporate marketing issues.

Muserk VID will help our Japense customers make sure they are getting the most from their video assetes as well as protect from illegal usage, and this partnership will prove invaluable to do so. We look forward to our bright future in the Japanese market as we continue seek to improve rights management globally.

Read more on Billboard

Read more on Nikkei

Muserk Announces Partnership with Japan’s Largest Musical Copyright Administration Society JASRAC

Muserk is happy to announce that we are partnering with The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC). JASRAC is not only the biggest copyright administration society in Japan, it is one of the largest rights societies outside of the United States. We will be leveraging proprietary tools like MPAC® and MMatch® to ensure a seamless collection of JASRAC’s U.S.-based mechanical rights on YouTube.

“JASRAC was founded in 1939 by Japanese composers and lyricists to protect the copyrights of musical works,” said JASRAC’s director in charge of international, Saito Mami. “We are happy to partner with such an innovative company that recognizes the abundance and importance of JASRAC repertoire on YouTube in America. I look forward to this agreement with Muserk bringing good results for Japanese rights owners.”

With the growing popularity of Japanese music and content on YouTube in the U.S., the partnership strengthens both companies’ positions within the growing and complex global online music business. Both MPAC® and MMatch® were specifically designed to find usage of our customer’s data amongst very large datasets while automating the entire royalty chain. This workflow allows us to to do the work of hundreds of people accurately and in a fraction of the time. We feel that Muserk is a perfect fit for the enormous scale of JASRAC’s data.

“We are very excited to be working with JASRAC,” noted Paul Goldman, Founder and CEO at Muserk. “JASRAC is a forward-looking rights society that has always been proactive about collecting royalties in its own territory and this partnership will help to extend the practice of proper remuneration of rights owners globally.”

Muserk Partnering With South Africa’s Largest Mechanical Rights Organization (CAPASSO)


Muserk has announced that we are partnering with South Africa’s largest mechanical rights organization, the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association (CAPASSO). Leveraging tools like MMatch®, Muserk will help CAPASSO spread their wings, and be a leader, not only in emerging markets like Africa, but every market worldwide.

South Africa’s parliament has recently passed the Copyright Amendment Bill intended to modernize the country’s four-decade-old copyright laws. The bill, awaiting presidential signature, has come under heavy scrutiny for “deviation from its original vision”. The bill seeks to improve access to those with disabilities, facilitate access to research and social development, and enhance creativity and innovation by empowering authors and creators.

South Africa has been the continent’s largest performing rights market with more than 50% of revenue coming from streaming. This partnership will help find more revenue for those artists. Muserk will collect streaming royalties from YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Pandora, Tidal, and Deezer in the United States as well as YouTube in Brazil and Canada.

Read more about it on Billboard