For a collective management organization, one of the biggest operational challenges lies in knowing when a work in its repertoire is used, where, and how frequently, because whether rights reach the right people depends on it.
For decades, the answer to that question depended almost exclusively on declarations. Broadcasters reported what they had aired, platforms sent playback logs, and CMOs processed that information manually or with proprietary systems. The problem with that model is that data quality depends on who generates it, and errors or gaps in reports translate directly into undistributed rights.
Active monitoring as an alternative
Active monitoring technology inverts that logic. Instead of waiting for someone to report the use of a work, the system listens continuously and detects uses on its own. The tool that makes this possible is called audio fingerprinting.
The concept is more intuitive than it seems. Just as a fingerprint condenses the unique traits of a finger into an identifiable pattern, audio fingerprinting condenses the acoustic characteristics of a recording, its timbre, its melodic structure, its dynamics, into a compact digital signature. When the system detects audio on any channel it is monitoring, it generates the signature of that fragment and compares it against a database of known recordings. If there is a match, it records the use.
What makes this process technically complex is that audio in the real world rarely arrives clean. A song aired on television may have background noise, signal compression, post-production effects, or tempo changes. The system has to be robust enough to recognize the work despite those variations, and precise enough not to confuse one recording with another that sounds similar.
BMAT and the scale of the problem
BMAT is one of the companies that solved that problem at an industrial scale. Founded in Barcelona in 2006, it now monitors 9,000 radio and television channels in real time across 140 countries, processing 80 million identifications daily. Its database accumulates more than 72 million recordings against which it compares the audio it captures.
For a CMO, working with BMAT means receiving usage reports generated by direct detection rather than by third-party declaration. That change has concrete practical consequences. AGEDI, the Spanish society of phonogram producers, works with BMAT to monitor advertising on television channels and attributes to that collaboration a measurable increase in the coverage of music in advertising it processes.
BMAT's core product for CMOs is BackOffice, a platform that integrates member management, usage processing, and distribution in a single environment, following CISAC standards and integrating with systems such as IPI, ISWC, and WID. The product's logic is to connect monitoring data with the society's complete operational flow, so that the identification of a use ends up deriving into a correct distribution without manual intervention at each step.
What monitoring does not cover
Active monitoring solves a critical part of a CMO's operation. But the other major challenge is equally important and usage data alone does not answer it: who is licensed to use that content, under what conditions, and how the commercial relationship with licensees is managed.
That part of the operation requires a different layer of technology. A CMO needs to know not only that a work was aired, but whether the operator that aired it has an active contract, what type of license covers that use, and what the status of its relationship with the society is. That management, which involves the complete cycle from the first contact with a potential licensee to the follow-up of the contract and the relationship over time, is where global.esur operates.