Best Practices for Catalogue Transfers explained

You can access version 1.0 of the text of the Best Practices for Catalogue Transfers here.

Purpose of Best Practices for Catalogue Transfers

The process of transferring catalogues from one record company or aggregator/distributor to another is, today, very inefficient. Catalogue transfers regularly lead to the disappearance of content – even if only for a short period of time – from DSP’s services. In addition, consumer-provided data such as playlists or comments are often lost alongside long-term usage information. As a consequence, handling catalogue transfers, today, are causing a non-trivial amount of administrative work for all companies involved. This Best Practices for Catalogue Transfers has been designed to improve the process.

Core concepts

The foundation of the Best Practices for Catalogue Transfers is that there are certain roles that different companies play in a catalogue transfer. The text of the Best Practices for Catalogue Transfers sets out what these are and how each interacts with the others during the process of a catalogue transfer. Some of the key roles are set out in the table below.