Discussion Group: http://groups.google.com/group/aggregati/

The problem: content creators sell with multiple agencies, where sales data is available in a logged-in webpage and/or as downloadable spreedsheet files. Collection and visualization of this data is a tedious process when done manually.

Several services have cropped up to automatically log in to the agencies and collect this data, but screen-scraping is high-maintenance for the aggregate agencies and subject to blocking by the agencies, by either technical or legal means.

The solution: a common API that presents all the most required data points that makes it simple and secure for agencies to eliminate the problem of screen-scraping, while at the same time letting their Artists drastically increase productivity.

Establish SDK's (Software Development Kit's) in the popular programming languages such as PHP, Ruby, and .NET, with a set of datapoints that are flexible enough to work cross-agency. Agencies would plug this code into their sites, and offer a secure, authenticated means for artists to aggregate their statistics on 3rd-party websites.

An accreditation standard could be realized to allow the 3rd-party aggregation firms to be authenticated by the stock agencies, enabling the artists to not be required to provide their individual site login information to the aggregation agencies - instead each Artist opts-in on the stock agencies to allow the accredited aggregation firm to access their statistics.