Many modern businesses now treat data as a valuable asset, even if they are still figuring out what exactly they might want to do with it. This is perhaps an appealing new way to view a music industry that has found its income decimated by copyright infringement; audience-focused data metrics can be used to define success in ways that differ from the dreary traditional sales figures. Unfortunately, it is also a tricky proposition technically, because although the way audio is encoded digitally is great for reproducing sounds, after the drums and guitars get all mashed together it becomes essentially impossible to “search” through the audio in the traditional sense, the way we might extract text passages from ebooks.
Source: There Is a Subtle Power Struggle for Control of Music Metadata | Motherboard