deecoob GmbH is taking over the event crawling in Great Britain for the British collecting societies PPL and PRS. With its cloud-based service and data platform MESLIS, deecoob operates the world’s leading crawler for finding events on the Internet. Collecting societies can use this technology to identify unreported events and better enforce the copyrights of their members.

deecoob GmbH and PPL PRS Ltd (a joint venture of British PPL and PRS) have signed a contract regarding internet searches for events. The Dresden-based company will be searching for digital data on events, venues, promoters, artists and setlists for the British collecting societies. With MESLIS, deecoob has the leading search robot for collecting data and leads for the licensing of events and facilities worldwide. The data science specialists at deecoob will gradually train the platform, which is based on modern crawling technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, for the live event and music market in the UK.

“GEMA has relied on the instrument of digital and automated event research on the Internet for years in order to improve market coverage and assert the justified claims of rights holders. This is why we decided to integrate deecoob into GEMA last year. From the outset, it was our declared aim to also offer this service to our international partner organisations. We are pleased and proud that, with PPL PRS, two of the world’s leading collecting societies are now once again relying on MESLIS and are very much looking forward to working together,” says Christian Seitz, Director Licensing and Distribution Performing Rights at GEMA.

MESLIS systematically searches the Internet and identifies events, venues and organizers that are currently not licensed by the collecting societies due to their small scale, geographical dispersion or lack of resources. Between 2.5 and 3 million events take place in the UK every year, which will be recorded and categorized by MESLIS in the future. In addition, MESLIS will identify and qualify around 1 million venues and almost 1 million event organizers to make them available to PPL PRS for licensing. Calculations show that 99 percent of the additional revenue from the digital and automated search by MESLIS will directly benefit the authors.

“The signature of the contract with PPL PRS is an important milestone for deecoob on our way to establishing MESLIS as the leading data and service platform for the global music industry,” says Matthias Friedrich, Managing Director of deecoob. “It is also renewed proof of the outstanding performance of MESLIS. With our crawler, collecting societies can increase their revenues by more than ten percent and at the same time ensure greater transparency and fairness among their customers.”