039 – How PEX Fingerprinted 20 Billion Audio and Video Files and Turned It Into a Product to Help Musicians, Artists and Creators Monetize their Work

Every now and then, I like to insert a music-and-data episode into the show since hey, I’m a musician, and I’m the host 😉 Today is one of those days! Rasty Turek is founder and CEO of Pex, a leading analytics and rights management platform used for discovering and tracking video and audio content using data science. Pex’s AI crawls the internet for user-generated content (UGC), identifies copyrighted audio/ visual content, indexes the media, and then enables rights holders to understand where their art is being used so it can be monetized. Pex’s goal is to help its customers understand who is using their licensed content, and what they are using it for — along with key insights to support monetization initiatives and negotiations with UGC platform providers. In this episode of Experiencing Data, we discuss: How the data science behind Pex works in terms of being able to fingerprint actual songs (the underlying IP of a composition) vs. masters (actual audio recordings of songs) The challenges PEX has in identifying complex, audio-rich user-generated content and cover recordings, and ensuring it is indexing as many usages as possible. The transitioning UGC market, and how Pex is trying to facilitate change. One item that Rasty discusses is Europe’s new Copyright Directive law, and how it’s impacting UGC from a licensing standpoint. How analytics are empowering publishers, giving them key insights and firepower to negotiate with UGC platforms over licensed content. Key product design and UX considerations that Pex has taken to make their analytics useful to customers What Rasty learned through his software iteration journey at Pex, including a memorable example about bias that influenced future iterations of the design/UI/UX How Pex predicts and priorities monetization opportunities for customers, and how they surface infringements. Why copyright education is the “last bastion of the internet” — and the role that Pex is playing in streamlining copyrighted material. Brian also challenges Rasty directly, asking him how the Pex platform balances flexibility with complexity when dealing with extremely large data sets. Resources and Links Designingforanalytics.com/theseminar Pex.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/synopsi Quotes from Today’s Episode “I will say, 80 to 90 percent of the population eventually will be rights owners of some sort, since this is how copyright works. Everybody that produces something is immediately a rights owner, but I think most of us will eventually generate our livelihood through some form of IP, especially if you believe that the machines are going to take the manual labor from us.” - Rasty “When people ask me how it is to run a big data company, I always tell them I wish we were not [a big data company], because I would much rather have  “small data,” and have a very good business, rather than big data.” - Rasty “There's a lot of these companies that [have operated] in this field for 20 to 30 years, we just took it a little bit further. We adjusted it towards the UGC world, and we focused on simplicity” - Rasty “We don't follow users, we follow content. And so, at some point [during our design process] we were exploring if we could follow users [of our customers’ copyrighted content].... As we explored this more, we started noticing that [our customers] started making incorrect decisions because they were biased towards users [of their copyrighted content].” - Rasty “If you think that your general customer is a coastal elite, but the reality is that they are Midwest farmers, you don't want to see that as the reality and you start being biased towards that. So, we immediately started removing that data and really focused on the content itself—because that content is not biased.” - Rasty “[Re: PEX’s design process] We always started with the guiding principles. What is the task that you're trying to solve? So, for instance, if your task is to monetize your content, then obviously you want to mon