Accenture launches Rights & Royalties Management
Date: 16-01-2008
Source: Business Wire
Accenture (NYSE: ACN) today introduced a new portfolio of services to help music, entertainment and other companies active in the intellectual property industry manage and protect the intellectual property rights of musicians, authors and publishers in the rapidly expanding digital marketplace.
The new service portfolio, called Rights & Royalties Management, provides an end-to-end process that focuses on three main functions: a rights and royalties solution that provides all facets of rights and royalties management -- from acquiring the rights and selling the licenses to collecting fees and paying the rights holders; IT hosting and application maintenance services; and business process outsourcing services. Accenture will also draw on its extensive experience in the media and entertainment industry to provide management consulting services that help companies exploit the online environment by optimizing business models and processes.
Accenture has signed Buma/Stemra as the first client of its new Rights & Royalties Management portfolio. Buma/Stemra is a Dutch rights and royalties organization that defends the creative rights of Dutch music authors and collects its customers' (music authors and publishers) financial royalties. Under its contract with Accenture, Buma/Stemra has begun outsourcing all of its back-office and IT activities to Accenture.
"Accenture's rights and royalties initiative delivers end-to-end intellectual property management solutions to our clients, ensuring the efficient tracking and administration of their intellectual property and significantly accelerating and strengthening Accenture's digital media capabilities," said Greg Douglass, global managing director of Accenture's Media & Entertainment practice. "The contract with Buma/Stemra is a significant step toward the realization of our ambition to deliver solutions throughout the media and entertainment digital supply chain."
The Rights & Royalties Management portfolio is designed to enable companies to lower costs by helping them: standardize and optimize the rights and royalties collection process; automate labor-intensive activities such as matching usage data to the content library and calculating royalties; and sourcing labor to more cost-effective suppliers.
The portfolio should also help companies improve their intellectual property management; focus on their core business of attracting artists and creating/buying content; and improve key performance-indicator-driven reporting capabilities and analysis.
In conjunction with the introduction of the new portfolio, Accenture has opened two rights and royalties service centers (RRSCs) in Amsterdam and Prague. The RRSCs will focus on four key industry constituent areas that engage rights and royalties administration: music copyright collecting societies; neighboring collecting societies; music companies with rights and royalties administration; and media, entertainment and communications companies with rights and royalties administration needs.
.jpg)
