Music

Anti Counterfeiting Consumer Goods | IP Protection | MarkScan

Music Protection

Solution

The biggest challenge a music company faces in online content protection is the scale of operations & its cost. This is driven by the very nature of their core product – a music track. A music track is generally a ~5 MB file that can be easily stored on a shared server. A music company typically seeks to protect its interests in thousands of music tracks simultaneously.

MarkScan is the first Indian firm to have developed a solution that addresses the content protection needs of music companies. Our custom designed solution can seamlessly integrate the detection & enforcement of a huge portfolio of music tracks into a single easy-to-manage project.

This has enabled MarkScan to be the preferred choice of large scale music companies, as well as the Indian Music Industry – the association of all Indian music companies.

Project Strategy

In order to address the nature of piracy for music content, we have developed a highly focused approach. Key elements of the solution are listed below:

Platform Weightage Focus Areas
WAP/MP3 Sites 20% Cyber-lockers, WAP sites, blogs, social media
Torrent sites 20% Torrent search engines, torrent file lockers
Streaming 30% User generated streaming content portals e.g. Youtube, dailymotion
Mobile Apps 30% App stores e.g. Play Store, iTunes store

Best Practices

By virtue of our proprietary research, project experience and domain expertise, we have developed a framework of best practices to be followed for ensuring optimal results in protecting music content against piracy on the internet. Below are key highlights:

  • Internet has maximum pirated content, however mobile apps & YouTube has larger user base
  • Enforcement across platforms varies slightly – most effective is on YouTube
  • None of the platforms can be ignored, however optimal focus on each needs to be decided
  • New releases are most pirated. Hence, they should be the focus of anti-piracy efforts
  • Popular portfolio tracks need to be identified for focused efforts
  • Music piracy is clearly focused on single tracks, rather than piracy of the full albums. Full albums are mostly found on torrent sites
  • For optimal results, each track needs to be focused upon as a separate property
  • Anti piracy needs to be taken up as an ongoing exercise, synced with the release plan
  • As each track is a separate property, highly focused approach is required to limit the scale
  • Tracks selected for anti-piracy efforts need to be constantly updated

Value Addition

Over time, MarkScan has proved to be a valuable partner for music companies in establishing strategic relationships with large global platforms to enable revenue maximization.

MarkScan is uniquely positioned with working relationships with several large content owners as well as platform owners. This provides us the opportunity to communicate their mutual needs to each other and hence create a strong base for monetization.

Success Story

The success of our strategies in copyright enforcement for music can be measured by the number of clients who have renewed their projects with us – 100%. MarkScan is the chosen partner for several leading music companies to protect their rights on the internet.