GEMA recently acquired deecoob GmbH, Dresden – a web crawling service provider for collecting societies. Web crawling events is an important tool for music collecting societies all over the world, enabling them to identify events where music is played in public. Nowadays, public events are ususally announced and advertised digitally. For collecting societies such as GEMA, web crawling events is a key technology in order to be able to ensure comprehensive market coverage for their rightsholders in their future licensing activities. The crawling technology uses text recognition to identify and record event notifications and matches such notifications to existing reportings by licensees. In this way, unlicensed usage of music is identified and comprehensive market coverage ensured, thus securing revenues for GEMA members.

Web crawling: a key technology for the digital future

With its acquisition of deecoob, GEMA is taking its next strategic step on the path to digitalisation and growth. The crawler technology will ensure that GEMA’s market coverage of licensing public events as comprehensive as possible in the future. This is particularly important for authors of music as 2020 has turned out to be a difficult year for events. Through machine learning and artificial intelligence, the crawler technology is able to react flexibly to new event formats such as open-air concerts in drive-in cinemas. By adapting search words, new formats of events can easily be discovered, assuring licensing. Acquiring this existing technology, rather than developing a web crawler solution in-house, puts GEMA at both an economic and a strategic advantage.

deecoob remains independent

Deecoob, with its about 30 employees, will continue to operate independently out of Dresden under the GEMA umbrella. The previous managing directors of deecoob Service GmbH and deecoob Technology GmbH, Matthias Friedrich, Claudia Manicke and Thomas Thom, will continue to manage the company. Thanks to their many years of experience as GEMA contractors, deecoob employees have in-depth knowledge of GEMA, its tariff structure and the events market.

You can read more details about this transaction here …