Laura Williams manages SoundExchange’s communications strategies, including the new, better-than-ever www.SoundExchange.com. 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 A²IM, 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.