The Elephant In The Room: Unclaimed / Undistributed Royalties
In the United States, there are several “unclaimed / undistributed royalties” funds held by music rights organizations. These funds collectively consist of tens of millions of dollars in undistributed earnings generated by the use of music within the greater music industry, from legislative appropriations imposed on manufacturers of audio home recording media, and from agreements with foreign entities.
Some of the organizations (SoundExchange, AFM & SAG-AFTRA Intellectual Property Rights Distribution Fund, Film Musicians Secondary Markets Fund, Live Television Videotape Supplemental Market Fund, and although this is not royalties per say, the US Copyright Office has a Section 115 NOIs Filing database that can be used to track down missing mechanical royalties) have created public databases so that music creators can search to see if they have royalties sitting in these funds. However, the biggest funds do not have public databases and often music creators can not be reached by any of these funds to be notified that they have unclaimed royalties.
I am working on a side project called RoyaltyClaim.com to address this issue of unclaimed / undistributed royalties. The goal is to get each of these funds to join the RoyaltyClaim.com Disclosure Program and to encourage them to submit very basic information to us on a periodic basis regarding the income participants who are due royalties. We will then aggregate these disclosures and maintain one searchable public database accessible for free by music creators and income participants.
By aggregating these lists of unclaimed / undistributed royalties information, we can aid income participants — including songwriters, recording artists, publishers, labels, musicians, background vocalists, composers, and beneficiaries (in the event of musician parents or spousals who passed away, but their music still generates royalties) — in locating and claiming their monies.
If you are a music creator, you should signup at RoyaltyClaim.com to be notified of our launch. We are currently in conversations with the various funds to get them to cooperate and help creators and their families.
I’m Meeting With Congressman Adam Schiff To Discuss The Rights of Music Creators #GIMD
Congressman Adam Schiff represents California’s 28th District
On Wednesday, as part of the “GRAMMYs in My District” initiative, I will join a select group of fellow The Recording Academy / The GRAMMYs members to meet with Congressman Adam Schiff to discuss the rights of music creators. And across the United States, other members will be meeting with their district’s Congress persons as well.
I hope to be able to address the issues that I care about, which affects music creators across the US. I want to urge my Congressman Schiff to support the Fair Play Fair Pay Act, which would create an income stream for artists when their music is played on AM/FM radio (much like the rest of the world) and support the AMP Act, which would allocate royalties to music producers and engineers when the music they’ve worked on is performed on SiriusXM, Music Choice, Pandora, and over 2,500 webcasters and digital music services.
In light of the recent firing of the Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante, which happened oddly at a time when Google and Amazon is using the loopholes of the U.S. Copyright Act to avoid paying thousands of songwriters for the use of millions of songs across their music properties, I want to address if and how Congress plans to close these loopholes that enable wealthy multinational corporations to stiff the little guys. And I would like Congress to help us move towards a system of equitable representation of songwriters and fair market royalty rates for compulsory licenses.
We will be posting updates during and after these meetings across social media. Follow the hashtag #GIMD for posts. Learn more about The Recording Academy’s Advocacy & Public Policy at www.grammy.org/recording-academy/advocacy.
Google and Amazon Leverage Copyright Loophole to Use Songs Without Paying Songwriters
Two vastly wealthy multinational media companies are exploiting a copyright law loophole to sell the world’s music without paying royalties to the world’s songwriters on millions–millions–of songs. Why? Because Google and Amazon–purveyors of Big Data–claim they “can’t” find contact information for song owners in a Google search. So these two companies are exploiting songs without paying royalties by filing millions of notices with the Copyright Office at a huge cost in filing fees that only megacorporations can afford–an unprecedented land grab in nature, size and scope.
That’s right–Google and Amazon are falling over themselves to use their market power to stiff songwriters yet again. And as I will show, it is not just obscure songs that are affected. New releases, including one example from Sting, are also targets suggesting significant revenue loss to songwriters. (I go into this in more detail on this series of posts.)
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Teen-Focused App Musical.ly Is the Music Industry’s New Secret Weapon | VICE | United Kingdom
Awesome article by Vice on how young singers and rappers are using musical.ly to build fanbases, promote new music, drive engagement and sales, and generate buzz that has led to record deals, radio airplay, and ranking on Billboard charts.
Are any of you using musical.ly as a part of your overall digital strategy? If so how and what results have you seen?
Impressive app sets for a music tech startup:
Musical.ly boasts more than 11 million video uploads per day from more than 120 million users worldwide; 64 percent of the app’s American users fall within the coveted 13–24 demographic, and 75 percent are female. Hoping to capitalize on that audience, Dae Dae debuted a 15-second snippet of “Wat U Mean” on musical.ly in August; to promote it, he hosted an in-app contest challenging listeners to make a music video of themselves performing his signature dance, where he languidly swings his arms in the air to the song’s staccato “Aye” shouts. Since its inception, the challenge has yielded a staggering 153,719 responses, with scores of newly won fans performing their own renditions of the “Aye” dance.
Read full article: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-social-media-app-musically-is-changing-music-marketing-v23n07
[VIDEO] Watch How TuneRegistry Can Help Indie Music Creators Protect Music & Unlock Royalties
Are you an indie artist looking to unlock additional income streams from your music?
Are you a band confused about what rights each member owns and how to protect them?
Are you a manager looking to save time and streamline reoccurring music industry administration tasks?
Are you an indie label or publisher looking for a better way to organize your company’s catalog in a collaborative space?
TuneRegistry is a next generation music management platform that enables creators and rights-holders to streamline the administration of their music catalogs.
Learn more at www.tuneregistry.com.
Music Industry Announcements
A few music industry announcements:
1. I am giving a talk and mini-workshop on Saturday, August 13th at 11am at the Indie Entertainment Summit titled “Music Metadata Matters: How Metadata Impacts Your Income & Opportunities” followed by speaking on a panel on YouTube video monetization for DIY indie artists and bands. Get deats and tickets at http://www.IESfest.com.
2. I am organizing and hosting the Southern California Music Industry Professionals’ August Music Industry Mixer on Thursday, August 18th form 6pm to 9pm at The Federal Bar. We have a special guest speaker, Tiamo Vettori De Vettori, Founder/CEO of Musicpreneur Academy and a Music Success Coach (www.TiamoMusic.com), will give a talk “Secret High Paying Gigs: 5 Lucrative Markets for Musicians in the NEW Music Industry.” This event is FREE. Join SCMIP at http://www.meetup.com/SCMIPonline and RSVP for the mixer at http://www.SCMIP-August.eventbrite.com.
3. I have a panel submitted for SXSW 2017 on music rights and metadata in the ever evolving digital music space featuring panelists from Music Reports, BuzzAngle, TuneRegistry, and Crunch Digital. Vote for the panel and leave comments at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/62361.
4. I am now the full-time CEO of TuneRegistry, an easy-to-use music catalog and metadata management platform with built-in music administration tools for the independent music community. TuneRegistry helps music creators and rights-holders organize their music catalog and streamline administrative tasks such as registering with rights organizations. Our goal is to have 1,000 music creators and rights-holders using TuneRegistry by the end of 2016. Please tell your music industry friends and send them to http://www.tuneregistry.com for details.
To stay up-to-date about my projects, work, involvements, and my upcoming appearences subscribe to my blog at http://www.daeboganmusic.com, follow me on Twitter @daeboganmusic, and like my Facebook page Dae Bogan Music.
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.
[Podcast] My Interview About Music Data On UCLA Center for Music Innovation’s “Innovating Music” Podcast
I had the honor of being a guest on UCLA Center for Music Innovation’s “Innovating Music” podcast where I talked about music rights and meta data, which is the epitome of our work at TuneRegistry. Check out my episode, “Life as a ‘Data Nerd’: Dancing with Music Data.”
The podcast can be found and followed at http://musicinnovation.libsyn.com/, as well as at the following podcast sites:
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/innovating-music/id1107854634
Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/I5b6f4qdhfugvkpv5aopo6istga
Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/fullcast/innovating-music
Grammy Winning Engineers Launch Digital Mastering Service For DIY Musicians, eMastered
Using an intelligent mastering engine built from analyzing thousands of hit songs, eMastered gives musicians an easy and affordable way to master tracks from the comfort of their own homes.
Grammy Award-winning engineer Smith Carlson and hit EDM singer/producer Collin McLoughlin announce the launch of eMastered, an online tool redefining the way musicians approach audio mastering. eMastered enables users to instantly master recordings online, making what is traditionally a complex and expensive process much more simple, affordable, and accessible to musicians worldwide.
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