2 Scope

The main incentive to make a specific Catalogue Transfer run smoothly lies with the company that acquires the rights and the DSP that wants to continue to serve its customers.

It has been argued that there is no incentive for the company that relinquishes the rights to make the transfer smooth. However, this approach appears to be short-sighted as most record companies regularly acquire and relinquish catalogues. Thus, a company that is relinquishing content today is likely to acquire content tomorrow, where it would greatly benefit from a smooth transfer.

In addition, and as mentioned above, Catalogue Transfers cause additional workload for all involved companies. This includes the company relinquishing a catalogue as well as the aggregators and distributors providing services to the companies relinquishing and/or acquiring content. This comes in the form of answering emails and telephone calls from a DSP who has detected an apparent overclaim from two record companies. Resolving such overclaims and other queries does also cause additional work for the acquiring rights controller and any involved DSPs. 

Therefore, it seems reasonable to expect record companies or aggregators/distributors who relinquish content to also help with the process of transferring catalogues.