Breaking Bread, Giving Bread Crumbs: The Challenge Facing Beyoncé, Drake, And 150 Other People

Between Beyoncé’s “Lemonade”‬ and Drake’s “Views” albums‬, there are over 150 writers and producers credited across their combined 32 tracks.

I can only imagine the music compensation nightmare that will ensue over the next 12 months as streaming, DPD, and airplay royalty checks start to go out to the multi-national team of creators and rights holders.

Who is responsible for ensuring the accuracy of rights holder information across all tracks? Who is checking that digital music services have complete metadata to match sound recordings to their underlying compositions? Who is accounting to the background vocalists and session musicians?

Did every producer and engineer secure letter of directions from Beyoncé and Drake to properly claim a portion of Pandora payouts? Who is looking after the contributors who do not have multinational publishers? Will they capture their piece of neighboring rights, DART royalties, or Spotify mechanicals?

Who will lose out due to inefficiencies? Who will have money left on the table due to an inability to properly claim and collect?

These are the questions that we ask ourselves at TuneRegistry and why we’ve built the next-generation music rights & metadata management platform to empower creators and rights holders.