Music information: the need for a central music licensing database

Musical Digital Service Providers (DSPs), like Pandora and Spotify, rely on a patchwork of databases and services to acquire licenses for the music they play. This results in both inefficiency and an unfair advantage to parties that have the leverage to negotiate better terms than their independent counterparts. A universal music database would be a giant step toward rectifying this inequality, as well as lowering the barrier to entry for new DSPs. Here, the main obstacles for such a system are laid out, as well as a possible scheme for such a universal database that includes the most recent technological developments in this field