Content for the World: Global IP Marketplace RightsIn Brings Efficient Management, Real-Time Analytics to Video and Music Deals

RightsIn, the IP marketplace tackling global content issues, has just launched its newest marketplace platform: RightsIn Music.

RightsIn has already made steady inroads into the global film and video markets, creating new opportunities for indie distributors, bringing foreign broadcasters and content users out of the shadows and into licensed usage, and streamlining rights management. “While it used to take an entire working day to determine availability, it now takes a matter of seconds,” states Ray Young, CEO and founder of RightsIn. “We can crunch the data and let both sides know what deals are possible.”

The marketplace charges an artist-friendly 10% on done deals, while offering a robust rights management dashboard that can ingest metadata quickly from sources like IMDB and Spotify, set up exclusivity and usage parameters, bundle content into discounted packages, and divvy up markets. With the global market in mind, RightsIn inked a partnership with Chinese third-party payment platform Dinpay, to enable seamless and simple international payment transactions.

“Now, we’re excited to apply these same tools, including real-time analytics, to the music market,” Young says.

Young and his development team love building tech tools that solve the problems plaguing the creative industries in the digital era. Young got his start in entertainment-related tech by creating software that managed the incredibly complex physical distribution of entertainment products. The software got DVD titles to big-box retailers just in time, in just the right amounts, keeping tabs on everything from shelf space to sales.

It was a hit. Young’s product dramatically increased efficiency. After fifteen years, however, “it became really clear that physical was no longer the future,” he remarks. “So we decided to focus on digital.”

He had strong relationships at studios, ties that helped him see the next problem that needed solving. Studios and large distribution companies had thousands of films, thousands of hours of deep catalog content that owners struggled to exploit effectively. This content was in demand around the world, in markets huge and small. Yet bringing owners together with potential purchasers proved next to impossible.

“It would take the studio department responsible for rights management a week, just to field a query,” explains Young. “Simply to see if the material was available, and under what conditions at what cost. There was no way to exploit the catalog in real time, or to seal deals and complete payments internationally with any speed.” Distributors told Young of preparing for conferences by spending weeks preparing and printing out spreadsheets of what films were available where and for how much. “And if they didn’t happen to have your country, if they didn’t have a sheet for, say, Turkey, you couldn’t do the deal.”

Young and his team decided to fix this. Young turned to independent distributors and dug deep into their needs. “I said, let’s launch a marketplace,” recalls Young. “We’re going to help the small guys with IP and distribution, the 150-200 smaller distributors on the market. If we solve the problem for the industry, we solve it for everyone, in any market. What used to take an entire working day now takes a matter of minutes.”

What resulted was a platform built to nurture new markets, for content of all types. “Studios can’t exploit their content globally. They’d have to have a sales team all over the world,” Young notes. “In places like Bangladesh, it just doesn’t make sense, as the market is too small. So they don’t sell to those markets. What we’re trying to do is tell the studios that we are incremental to opening up new markets, places you’re not reaching today.”

These markets, once operating in the shadows, want to operate above the board. RightsIn is helping them do so, as the television station in Ulaanbaatar can now buy well-priced rights to broadcast A Fish Called Wanda. New markets are also opening up for independent content creators, be they dedicated filmmakers or passionate amateurs with some great GoPro footage.

Now RightsIn has opened its doors to musicians and independent labels, part of a multi-stage strategy that includes books and patents. “Any IP can be traded using our marketplace. Music is so interesting to us because musicians at all levels are looking for ways to expand their income, and one crucial way to do that is to make the most of what they already have, their rights,” says Young. “We want to help people monetize their rights, about 50 types of rights globally, directly. We ultimately are striving to solve the problem of sustainability, for the people who make and love culture, art, and entertainment.”