Muserk Lands on Inc. Magazine’s List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies – The Inc. 5000

Muserk Lands on Inc. Magazine’s Prestigious Annual List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies –

The Inc. 5000

No. 4 In Media, No. 779 Overall

With Three-Year Revenue Growth of 636%

 

NEW YORK, August 17, 2021Inc. Magazine today revealed that MUSERK is No. 4 in Media and No. 779 overall on its annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economy’s most dynamic segment—its independent small businesses. Intuit, Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Patagonia, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees on the Inc. 5000.  Not only have the companies on the 2021 Inc. 5000 been very competitive within their markets, but this year’s list also proved especially resilient and flexible given 2020’s unprecedented challenges.

“Being named to the Inc. 5000 list is an honor for the entire Muserk Team.  There has been a lot of blood sweat and tears poured into this company from a passionate team of people who believe in the important mission of getting creators paid, so it’s deeply gratifying to be recognized for everyone’s hard work. We’d also like to extend our congratulations to all the other organizations that made the list. We are in great company,” said CEO and Founder Paul Goldman. 

“The 2021 Inc. 5000 list feels like one of the most important rosters of companies ever compiled,” says Scott Omelianuk, editor-in-chief of Inc. “Building one of the fastest-growing companies in America in any year is a remarkable achievement. Building one in the crisis we’ve lived through is just plain amazing. This kind of accomplishment comes with hard work, smart pivots, great leadership, and the help of a whole lot of people.” Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at www.inc.com/inc5000.

 

CONTACT:        

Bobbie Gale

MixedMediaWorks

323-363-2171

bobbie@mixedmediaworks.com

 

More about Muserk:

Muserk is an AI technology-driven administration platform. With its proprietary Blue Matter  system, Muserk has significantly impacted royalty collection in the video and music spaces and currently manages over 7 million works on all the major tech platforms (YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, etc.). Muserk’s proven technology has found millions in uncollected royalties for copyright holders around the world, delivering a 40% increase in royalties on average for its clients. Muserk has offices in New York, Tokyo, Nashville and Copenhagen.

More about Inc. 5000:

Companies on the 2021 Inc. 5000 are ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2017 to 2020. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2017. They must be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2020. (Since then, some on the list may have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2017 is $100,000; the minimum for 2020 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Growth rates used to determine company rankings were calculated to three decimal places. There was one tie on this year’s Inc. 5000.  Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.’s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

 

Muserk’s “How to Work From Home (and Beyond)” Guide

By Madeline DeLuca

Just over a year ago, I started my position as a Rights Manager at Muserk. My first day on the job was the first official day the company had gone remote. I had the unique experience of learning how to do a new job through video calls, screen sharing, and good old-fashion trial and error. With a year under my belt, I can say with confidence that working from home has been a wonderful learning experience and has allowed me to pick up new skills I may not have had the opportunity to learn before this pandemic, many of which I will keep in my tool belt long after we can safely gather in an office again. 

With that in mind, I asked my fellow co-workers at Muserk to share with me their favorite tips and tricks that have been beneficial to them over the past year – the tricks that kept them focused, efficient, and engaged as they worked from home with the hum of their personal lives all around. I hope anyone reading this finds at least one piece of advice or information that makes their work from home experience a better one.

  1. Keep a physical notepad that is dedicated to work thoughts that don’t require immediate action. Just because you can work after hours late at night or early in the morning doesn’t mean you have to. Write down any tasks you think about after work hours and save them for the next day.
  2. Take walks during the day, especially when it is warm. It can help reduce stress. A benefit of working from home is you are able to take a nice midday stroll and get some fresh air. It can help you clear your head and focus better and push past the 3pm slump.
  3. Learn and use keyboard shortcuts. When working from home, it’s nice to be able to unplug from monitors and work elsewhere. Using keyboard shortcuts can allow you to navigate smoothly between tabs and workbooks.
  4. Try using the Pomodoro Technique. The Pomodoro technique is a time management method that breaks down your working time into intervals with set breaks at the end of each interval. For those who find it hard to focus on the task at hand because of constant interruptions, this technique can help you be more efficient and keep to the task at hand while allowing you to take a break to handle any distractions that have crept in.
  5. Take advantage of Zoom. Now that we’re a year into using Zoom as a tool, and while we both curse and bless it, isn’t it nice to video conference with people we may have only spoken to on the phone in the past?  
  6. Set weekly and daily goals for productivity based on actual work progress instead of time. Everyone has goals that they want to achieve in a workday/week, and sometimes it feels overwhelming. Setting goals based on concrete tasks rather than time spent working can help you to feel accomplished and productive, even if you were interrupted all day by the sound of the dishwasher, the lawn mower, the washing machine, etc. 
  7. Have a morning routine and stick to it. It is so easy to roll out of bed, grab your laptop and start working, but from experience, this can be detrimental to your work-life balance. Wake up with enough time to make a cup of coffee, go on a walk, listen to a podcast, eat some breakfast, or read a book. Allow yourself some personal time to separate your day. Once you get in the groove, the days will feel much more enjoyable. Also, you can continue this routine when you return to the office, and I believe that transition will feel more seamless. 

I have incorporated each of these tips into my work routine in one form or another, and it has drastically improved my work from home experience. I personally cannot wait to be able to gather safely again (and to actually meet my coworkers in person – some for the first time), but in the meantime, I will enjoy working from my comfy couch, not having a daily commute, therefore getting to spend a few extra hours with my husband, and being able to do seemingly endless amounts of laundry during my lunch hour. 

Cattle Not Pets

When I first heard the term “cattle not pets” it was the perfect metaphor to describe a concept I had always been aware of when developing for the cloud, but never had the words to describe. The idea that you should remove individuality from your cloud infrastructure and treat your resources as nameless and dynamic like cattle. Resources come and go all the time so there is no time to name, feed, and care for them as if they were pets.

I’m sure many of us have been somewhere that has a fleet of servers named after superheroes, Disney characters, or something exceedingly nerdy like Dr. Who villains. When we start talking about scalability, though, characters can’t be imagined fast enough. Not to mention the hand feeding required to spin up new instances of an application over and over again. As we were developing our cloud infrastructure to scale for Muserk, our first goal was to never connect directly to an instance again. This felt like a great starting point to answer the question of how do we deploy applications, manage state, and debug issues that arise. This is mostly a qualitative look at how we began to scale our operations in the early days of Muserk…. So for you super nerds out there we won’t go into detail about things like load balancing, caching, or infrastructure as code.

DEPLOYING APPLICATIONS

Probably the most important aspect of scaling is being able to deploy an application programmatically. Once we can do that everything else is just a facility. The obvious answer here is Docker. The more advanced answer involves Kubernetes or Terraform, but that’s a topic for another day. With a containerized application we can control dependencies, versions, the operating system, and any configuration that needs to be done ahead of time. So, all we need is a platform to run our container. The advantage of this is that this platform can be anything! The container will run exactly what we need, the exact same way, anywhere that can support docker. Once the process of starting one of these containers is automated, we are free to start up as many as we would like, allowing a load balancer to route traffic appropriately.

MANAGING STATE

Next there is the problem of how to manage state on a server instance that is essentially garbage. Writing to disk is out of the question because all of that information would be lost from instance to instance. Well, what about NFS? This could be a plausible solution, but too slow without provisioned IOPs (which are expensive in the cloud). Besides, we should do better!

In fact, this was the starting point for really honing our data model and forced us to come up with a first pass at some sort of ETL. As we ingest data, how do we store it so that our applications can access it in a consistent way? Once all of our data is in one place, we can use it as our Single Source of Truth. Using a database as a SSOT is its own complexity. The real lesson for managing state across a scalable infrastructure is to AVOID state when you can.

DEBUGGING ISSUES

Most commonly, the reason for needing to log into an individual instance is typically to figure out what went wrong. As resources start to scale this gets increasingly difficult anyway because an error could have occurred on any one of 4, 10, or, theoretically, n number of instances. So how do we figure out where problems are happening and how to fix them? There are all sorts of things to monitor across our applications. User experiences, resource trends, load times, are a couple of examples. Most importantly, in my opinion, are the error logs.

When an error occurs, we want to be made aware of it. At first pass you should be using a logger. A logger lets us standardize how we create new logs by assigning a category for each type of log and ordering them by severity. Some common categories include DEBUG, INFO, and ERROR. In this example, DEBUG level logs may be information that would be helpful when figuring out what happened, but not necessary to be looked through all the time. INFO-level logs are adding a bit higher severity. These are messages we may always want to see so that we can see usage in real time. ERROR logs, being the most severe, can be alerted on. We can configure our system to report when an ERROR has been logged so that we can take immediate action. We can then use the INFO and DEBUG logs to determine what happened. If we’ve done it correctly these logs will have information on the unique machine the application is running on so we can handle hardware-specific problems. Once we are collecting logs from all machines across all applications, we can begin to build dashboards around each application. Combined with usage and hardware metrics, we have a central location to view all relevant information.

I hope this was in some way helpful for thinking about your own cloud infrastructure.  As we continue to improve our architecture, we hope to have more to share. We are evolving our technology every day and are working hard to improve our ETL workflows and integrations into the substantial amount of processing we are doing with the data we generate. In the meantime, we will continue to backfill posts with what we have learned and implemented along the way of this journey into the final frontier.

Thoughts from a Working Musician In Nashville

“Nashville has a long history of songwriting.”

This was something that I heard over and over when I moved here in the fall of 2017. At the time, I didn’t understand that this statement was actually an insight into how the music industry operates. To me, the word “songwriter” wasn’t much different from the word “artist” or “musician.” I had grown up playing songs by my favorite artists as well as writing and performing my own songs. It was all music to me. It wasn’t until later that I realized the music industry operates on some very clear distinctions – particularly in Nashville.

One of the first shows I went to in Nashville was at a down home type venue called Belcourt Taps. The show was an “in the round” style showcase where four different songwriters sat on stage side by side and took turns playing a song they had recently written. I had never encountered this type of show in Austin where I had moved from, but I got the sense it was standard practice here. To my surprise, one of the songwriters, in particular, was a very bad musician. His guitar playing was filled with missed notes and he struggled to sing in tune. But what was fascinating, was he didn’t seem to care at all. He was more interested in the audience, trying to gauge their reaction to his songs. I quickly realized that he had no interest in performing these songs on his own. His goal was to refine his songs down to their most entertaining form – that three-and-a-half-minute gem. It reminded me of how a comedian works on a joke over and over until he or she gets it just right. This was my first insight into how the music industry makes a clear distinction between artists and songwriters.

About a year later, I began working for Muserk as a software developer. Muserk is a global rights administrator that leverages technology to perform its duties with an exceptional level of speed and scale. I was intrigued by the opportunity to combine my tech career with my love of music. Furthermore, it was a chance to learn more about the business side of the music industry, something I thought would be useful in my own music endeavors.

As soon as I started, I was thrown into (sink or swim as the saying goes) the very complicated world of rights management. One of my first projects was developing what would later be known as M-Match — our proprietary AI technology used for finding works in the vast ocean of DSP data. Through this I then learned the intricacies of one way the music industry makes money.

The music industry makes money from two copyrights: one for the underlying work or composition and the other for a sound recording. In practice, there are two types of businesses that form around this: publishers (songwriter/work) and labels (artist/sound recording). So, if you have a song playing on Spotify, let’s say, a portion of the money that is generated from that song should find its way to the label/artist and a portion should find its way to the publisher/songwriter/s. You may think (as I did) that a company like Spotify would know all of this in advance and take care of it. That is not the case.

One of the big problems is that the label and publishing worlds don’t really talk to each other. So, a label will push a song to Spotify and not provide (and in some cases even know) any information about the underlying songwriters. Therefore, Spotify won’t know where to send the publisher/songwriter portion of the money. This is a fairly simplified but accurate account of what happens.

This is where Muserk shines. We spend most of our time matching songwriter related metadata to sound recordings so that we can collect and distribute the appropriate royalties. In the age of digital music this isn’t an easy task. We use all kinds of technology, processes, and insight to match as much data as possible. We’re constantly trying to innovate so that we can match works fast, accurately and at scale. I spend most of my time building this technology and creating ways to convey its results. I feel proud knowing that the work I do contributes to getting musicians paid what they’re owed.

As a musician, my time at Muserk thus far has opened my eyes to how the music world really works. I’ve learned that businesses dedicate themselves entirely to very small pieces of the industry. In Nashville, for instance, there are networks of people that are just trying to write the next hit song and could care less about recording or performing it. Concurrently, there are networks of people trying to be the next big artist and could care less about writing their own songs. For me, I’m still trying to figure out where I fit in. But having a broader understanding of the industry as a whole I know will help me navigate my own musical journey. And, of course, my metadata will be correct.

the next hit song and could care less about recording or performing it. Concurrently, there are networks of people trying to be the next big artist and could care less about writing their own songs. For me, I’m still trying to figure out where I fit in. But having a broader understanding of the industry as a whole I know will help me navigate my own musical journey. And, of course, my metadata will be correct.

Muserk VID

Announcing Muserk VID, A Joint Venture With Japan’s Video Research to Tackle Japanese Rights Management

Muserk is excited to announce that we are partnering with the Japanese marketing research company Video Research Ltd. to form Muserk VID. The “VID” standing for Video ID, we will service, manage and protect the online rights of the major broadcasters, networks, and production companies of Japan, around the world. Specifically, Muserk VID will provide services for reporting the playback status of content (including illegal videos) on various DSPs as well as provide a management platform for content rights holders in Japan.

With this joint venture and the creation of Muserk V.I.D., we expect to see less piracy of Japanese content on all platforms and an opportunity for our customers to monetize their content online through royalty collection,” said Video Research president Wataru Mochizuki in a statement. “We knew we needed a company that offered something unique to match the power of our scale for this joint venture. The passionate team at Muserk and their propriety technology M-PACTM and M-Match® make this a perfect match.

Video Research Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President and CEO: Wataru Mochizuki) was established in 1962 as the only research institution in Japan that provides TV rating data. Since then, they have provided the most advanced data such as various media data and marketing data such as surveys of television ratings and radio listening rates in Japan, and provide total support for corporate marketing issues.

Muserk VID will help our Japense customers make sure they are getting the most from their video assetes as well as protect from illegal usage, and this partnership will prove invaluable to do so. We look forward to our bright future in the Japanese market as we continue seek to improve rights management globally.

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