Mapping Music Royalties

Société des Auteurs Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM), a French non-profit, recruited Sword Group and Esri France to assist in the design and development of a mobile app for employees of SACEM to use for tracking and collecting music royalties owed to them.

SACEM App Screenshot
SACEM App Screenshot

Key features

Location search

View the locations of client businesses and geocode locations that haven't been captured yet.

Identify locations

Pinpoint and identify royalty collection information for specific client locations.

Edit features

Collect and edit feature attributes including client information, royalty payments, and licensing rights in the field.

App details

Whenever music is played publicly at concerts or music festivals, as background music at shopping centers, or in movies and video games the artists are supposed to receive royalty payments. But all these public performances can be difficult to track.

Société des Auteurs Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM) is a nonprofit in France that helps music creators collect the royalties owed to them when their works are played in public. SACEM negotiates licensing rights and distributes royalty payments to creators. About 200 employees working from more than 70 locations across France collect general rights payments. These payments make up almost a quarter of SACEM's income. Facing strong growth in digital distribution and the use of background music, SACEM's goal was to improve its general rights collection tools so it could better serve society members. SACEM recruited Sword Group and Esri France to apply GIS to its operations. The nonprofit focused on adopting GIS at three different levels: national planning, campaigns for individual regions or sectors, and real-time updates from the field.

For national planning, Sword used ArcGIS API for JavaScript to build a web app for SACEM. The organization now uses Esri Business Analyst Desktop together with Esri's geocoding tools and segmentation data to define goals at the national level for all the regional teams. Once those teams receive this guidance, they can refine the goals to better suit their specific objectives. They can also establish campaigns that focus on individual sectors, such as hotels. Employees can then take campaign information into the field using a mobile app that Sword built with ArcGIS Maps SDK for Kotlin.

With the app, users can see the locations of client businesses, as well as geocode locations that haven't been captured yet. They can also view and edit facts about clients, such as the status of their contracts and their hours of operation. These tools have been widely adopted across SACEM, and users are very satisfied. The mobile app has helped employees more efficiently collect licensing rights in the field.

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