AIM, MUSO partner for anti-piracy service
April 23, 2018
By Colin Mann
AIM, a not-for-profit trade body that represents the UK’s independent music industry, is partnering with content protection and data-analytics solutions specialist MUSO to give the independent sector access to a bespoke digital piracy protection service.
AIM rightsholder members (independent labels and self-releasing artists) will receive access to a new, free-to-member digital piracy protection service, developed by MUSO, that will enable them to monitor their own content and automatically have pirated and unlicensed content removed from the Internet, giving them far more control of where their content appears online.
Key features of this new service include:
- content protection;
- automatic takedowns;
- an online dashboard that will allow content owners to see all piracy protection activity for their content.
The initiative was formally launched at AIM’s ‘Music Connected’, the UK’s biggest digital music conference in London.
In 2017 MUSO’s monitoring saw 73.9 billion visits to music piracy websites – a 14.7 per cent increase from 2016 – proving that digital piracy remains a problem for the music industry despite significant anti-piracy litigation. Over 16 billion pages were scanned by MUSO to protect digital content from piracy by automatically removing infringing content and search results.
“The impact on independent music businesses can be particularly hard without a consistent mechanism to remove unlicensed content from the Internet,” noted Andy Chatterley, co-founder and CEO, MUSO. “We are therefore delighted to be partnering with AIM to provide a new free-to-label digital anti-piracy service.”
“We can all agree that music piracy remains contentious and protection has been a historically difficult area,” added Paul Pacifico, CEO of AIM. “MUSO is at the forefront of digital piracy protection and are experts in the business intelligence insights that can be gleaned from it. This new partnership gives our rightsholder members access to a highly sophisticated anti-piracy solution, free at the point of access, and allows them oversight of their online content and piracy activity. Pirates steal both money and consumer data with no return for artists. This service will allow AIM Members to focus on the very positive relationships between artists and their fans by cutting out the pirates and is a huge win for us all.”