Music Identification and Rights Reporting: How RadioMan Produces Fingerprints and Integrates with a Rights Management System
Accurate music identification and reliable reporting are essential to modern radio operations. Broadcasters air huge amounts of content every day, and copyright organizations need precise data to ensure royalties are distributed correctly. RadioMan’s Fingerprint and Media Export plugins help automate this process, making it easier to capture, identify, and deliver music metadata and fingerprints to rights-management systems.
The Challenge: Identifying New and Local Music
Many broadcasters rely on FM monitoring systems to track what’s being played on air. These systems use audio fingerprinting to compare detected audio against a database of known works. Each track has a unique fingerprint along with the relevant copyright metadata. When a match is found, the information can be used to calculate royalties.
The process gets trickier when a station plays new or unreleased music, or music by local artists. In those cases, the copyright organization may not yet have the track or its fingerprint in its database. At first, the only place this new music exists is inside the broadcaster’s own radio automation system, so the gap needs to be bridged before external monitoring systems can recognize it.
Automating the Fingerprinting Workflow in RadioMan
To solve this challenge, RadioMan connects to a dedicated fingerprinting service. When new music is added, the Fingerprint Plugin automatically generates fingerprints using the fingerprinting engine running within RadioMan.
The workflow is fully automated:
- RadioMan sends audio files to the locally installed fingerprinting engine through an API
- The engine generates a unique fingerprint for each track
- Metadata and fingerprints are then prepared for export based on predefined rules and schedules
Administrators can configure rules such as:
- Processing tracks in batches (such as 50 at a time)
- Limiting fingerprinting to specific categories or content types
- Scheduling jobs to run, for example, at 10 minutes past each hour
Once fingerprinting is complete for newly created songs, the Media Export Plugin is notified, and the assets are ready for delivery.
Delivering Metadata and Fingerprints via the Media Export Plugin
The Media Export Plugin handles the final step by delivering fingerprints and metadata to the external copyright organization’s database. RadioMan connects to the organization’s API and uploads both the fingerprints and the related metadata.
With the plugin, users can define:
- Export schedules (for example, at 20 minutes past each hour)
- Target locations
- Export conditions, such as song categories, the scope of the export, and triggering rules
When metadata changes in RadioMan, the plugin automatically re-exports the updated information to keep the external system up to date.
A Reliable Integration for Rights-Management Workflows
Together, the Fingerprint and Media Export plugins create a smooth connection between RadioMan and the fingerprinting and identification infrastructure. This means:
- All music played on air, including fresh songs and songs from local artists, gets fingerprinted
- Copyright organizations receive all relevant metadata for copyright purposes
- Monitoring systems can identify on-air content with high accuracy
- Broadcasters stay compliant without manual data handling
This integration is already in active use with real-world customers and supports reliable, scalable rights-management workflows across different markets.
Looking to improve compliance and accuracy in your music reporting workflows? Contact us about integrating RadioMan with your existing rights-management systems.