Laura Williams manages SoundExchange’s communications strategies, including overseeing the launch of a new, better-than-ever www.SoundExchange.com in coming weeks. She holds degrees in Political Communications and Writing from Susquehanna University.
Imagine
you’re at a busy metropolitan airport. The luggage carousel goes
around, and people stop by, check the luggage tags, and pick up their
belongings. As the day wanes, though, there are still lots of suitcases
left on the conveyer belt with no luggage tags and no one to claim
them. Now, what if I told you that those suitcases are all filled with
cash – stacks of bills totaling millions of dollars – and some of it
might be yours.
This
is the problem created by the music industry’s awful lack of
standardized, quality metadata. Before the late 1990s, copyright law
offered no compensation to the recording artists or copyright holders
of sound recordings – unlike songwriters and publishers, these creators
of music didn’t earn a royalty when their work was used by music
services. Now, that loophole in the law has been closed (at least for
digital services – AM and FM radio are still unfairly exempt from
paying their fair share, but that’s another story). As we discussed in
a previous post,
the Copyright Office appointed SoundExchange to collect those royalties
and distribute them to the artists and owners. Before that happened, no
one had an incentive to keep a database of contact information on
recording artists – who played on which track, and how to reach them
now – or copyright information – which label or artist owned the
masters on any track. So when music services began sending royalties to
SoundExchange for the tracks they’d played, we faced an enormous
challenge.
There
are three major areas of data failure along the path of getting money
to artists and copyright holders. One: the failure of artists and
copyright holders to register with SoundExchange. Two: the failure of
the services which use music to properly report what they’ve used.
Three: the failure of copyright holders and artists to provide good
metadata with tracks before release, and to claim their repertoires
after release. But there’s good news – all of these are problems we can
work toward solving, so that artists and copyright holders can get paid
faster and more efficiently. Let’s look at each data gap, and what we
can all do to help fill in those gaps.
Artists and copyright holders fail to provide or update registration information with SoundExchange.
Services which use music pay SoundExchange royalties for each recording they play.
This
happens whether the artist has registered with SoundExchange or not,
whether they know about us or not, because it’s required by law. That
money is then held in escrow for the artist or copyright holder until
they register. An artist who registers today can claim their funds all
the way back to the first collection in 1996 – but they MUST register
with SoundExchange. SoundExchange can’t absorb or spend the unclaimed
money – we’re a non-profit – but without the necessary payment and
contact information, the money languishes in a marked account, waiting
to be claimed.
There
have been occasional grumblings in the media about SoundExchange being
unable to “find” artists – as though having a website for someone is
the same as being able to pay them. As an independently audited
non-profit, SoundExchange needs registration paperwork, signed by the
payee, a state ID to prove identity, and tax forms to be able to cut a
check. Many artists do not register, even after being contacted four,
six, or more times. Their money just sits here until they come and
register.
After registering, all artists and copyright
holders to make sure that they keep their contact information and
payment information up to date.
2. Services which use music and pay royalties to SoundExchange fail to properly report the tracks they have used.
A
huge percentage of this responsibility for providing good data falls on
the music-using services, who must file the proper reports of use with
the royalties they owe to artists.
Reports
sent to SoundExchange which are supposed to tell us whom to pay often
contain entries like “Playlist unavailable” or “Artist Unknown”.
Sometimes this is because the services do not have accurate information
on the songs they play.
For instance, a recording owned
by one rights holder may be licensed to another for use on a soundtrack
and the label who released the soundtrack may be incorrectly credited
as the owner of that recording.
Sometimes this is
negligence on the part of services that use the recordings. Under the
law, services are penalized for paying royalties late, but there is no
penalty for providing bad data, unusable data, or even no data at all.
SoundExchange has millions of dollars which came in with no data at all
attached. That means we don’t know who the royalties belong to, and we
can’t send them out. Further millions are tied up in sloppy reporting:
large sums held for “Various Artists,” “Playlist unavailable,” “Artist
Unknown,” and “Station break.” Among our top 25 unpaid artists, you’ll
find “Beethoven,” who never created a sound recording, and was reported
instead of the orchestra who earned that royalty. Some of these funds
will never be able to be sent out - there simply isn’t enough
information to find out who earned the royalties. But in cases where
the track-level information may be traceable, SoundExchange staff sort
through millions of these lines of data to correct them, and get people
paid. They correct misspellings, track down bad abbreviations and comb
through the myriad other variations we receive. And that doesn’t take
into account someone like Texas R&B/Gospel artist Kane West, (who
may be earning or losing royalties due to misspellings in reported logs
containing Kanye West) or hundreds of other near-duplicates which must
be untangled with track-level corrections.
SoundExchange
processed more than 7 billion performances last year. Even if 93% of
the log entries we received last year were perfect, that still means 49
million had to be adjusted by hand by our staff. Incomplete and
incompetent reporting continues to be a massive problem, as music
services use music without providing the proper information to help get
its creators compensated.
3.
Copyright holders and artists fail to provide good metadata with
recordings before release, and fail to claim their repertoires after
release.
We
have very significant sums of money held in escrow for “Promo Only,”
“Self-Released,” and “White Label.” When sending your releases to all
radio (AM & FM, Internet, satellite, cable), make sure that they
contain all the proper data services need to report accurately, so
SoundExchange can get you paid. We have developed an innovative system
called “PLAYS” (
Performance Log Archive of Your Songs)
which allows any artist or copyright holder to access the performance
logs provided to SoundExchange. If you see an incomplete or incorrect
listing in PLAYS for your recordings, you can send a message to
SoundExchange’s Customer Care department to make the correction. We’ll
verify and adjust the performances accordingly.
As
the first organization to really confront issues of artist and
copyright holder data in its day to day operations, SoundExchange is
proud to also be on the forefront of helping to resolve them. We have
already had several meetings this year with copyright holders and
directors of organizations at the highest levels to work on developing
consistent methods of encoding and reporting metadata. We have met with
the heads of international groups facing the same problems, and worked
toward strategies to improve payments.
SoundExchange
encourages any label or independent artist (anyone who owns master
recordings) to join us in our upcoming webinar, a joint project with A
2IM,
The American Association of Independent Music, to address these and
other concerns in getting independent artists and labels their proper
royalties. The live webinar will take place Wednesday, February 10 at
2pm ET, and will include a demonstration of the PLAYS data correction
mentioned above. Register to attend here:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/915090177, or check out our blog after the event for the rundown.
So
before those suitcases full of unclaimed money go around the carousel
another time, make sure you slap a luggage tag on what’s yours.
Register with SoundExchange, and make you’re your friends, colleagues,
bandmates and contacts are registered, too. Reach out to your favorite
digital music services and ask them to report accurately on what they
play. Make sure you send out your tracks with all the data you can, and
follow up in our PLAYS database to claim your tracks if they’re
misreported. Help SoundExchange help you get paid when you get played.
