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GRD announces London and Berlin bases

By | Published on Monday 13 May 2013

Global Repertoire Database

The organisations behind the music industry’s in-development Global Repertoire Database have announced that the copyright logging venture will set up its global headquarters in London, while an operations centre will be based in Berlin.

The London HQ, housing business development and other corporate functions, will open later this year, working alongside the existing development team at Deloitte. The Berlin facility will look after registrations and data processing, and may form the template for other such facilities elsewhere in the world.

First initiated in 2008, the GRD is an attempt by the music publishing sector to have one uber-database that lists who created, who owns and who controls every single musical work, including any regional variations. The aim is to make it simpler for licensees to work out who they need to be dealing with and paying in order to use musical works (though not sound recordings, initially at least), and to reduce any duplication of data aggregation by different publishing rights organisations around the world.

Confirming that GRD would have bases in the UK and Germany at launch, Andrew Jenkins, Chair of the International Confederation of Music Publishers, told CMU: “The decision to locate the Global Repertoire Database in two world capital cities, London and Berlin, was taken after a detailed selection process by the GRD working group, facilitated by our business partner, Deloitte”.

He added: “Potential locations were assessed and analysed over a long number of months and the decision was not at all easy as some excellent candidate cities were under consideration. Availability of suitably skilled staff, accessibility for global industry participants, and strength of legal protection for intellectual property were important criteria and of course the global nature and requirements of the GRD is a key consideration”.

As previously reported, in a statement earlier this year the organisations behind the database said that a scoping study was now compete, and that a ‘requirements and design phase’ was underway with plans to set up the GRD as a standalone legal entity this year, and to begin IT development. The current aim is to launch the database in 2015.



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