Royalties - Tumblr Posts
In the modern music industry, songwriters are finding less money from album sales and more from the collection of all sorts of royalties. Bands like the Black Keys, who spent over a decade trying to break through to the mainstream, finally did so with the help of placement of their songs in commercials for TV and film.
SoundExchange, a music industry non-profit focused on distributing digital performance royalties to recording artists and record labels, and BandPage, a leading solution for musicians to manage their presence online, recently teamed up to notify recording artists of unclaimed royalties with SoundExchange.
Together the two groups identified more than $2 million in unclaimed digital performance royalties for thousands of BandPage musicians who have not yet registered with SoundExchange. Bandpage musicians with unclaimed performance royalties will be notified by BandPage directly via email.
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We recently ran an article about how streaming services make it easier for an artist to cover a song.
The short version:
If you cover a song, and distribute it to a streaming-only service in the U.S., the streaming stores pay the royalties to the songwriter/publisher. You don’t need to do anything.
This in turn caused a number of readers to comment, some in disbelief, that the law and process made no sense; how in the world does the streaming service know who wrote the song and where the songwriter is so the service can pay him or her?
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Labels and performing artists are seeing good growth from digital performance royalties these days. But could they do better? SoundExchange, the performance rights organization for non-interactive digital music services like Pandora and SiriusXM, paid out $95.8 million in digital performance royalties to recording artist and record labels in the second quarter of 2012.
Payouts of $204.4 million for the first half of 2012 put SoundExchange on track to easily top 2011's disbursements of $249 million. But the second-quarter payout was a noticeable drop from the $108.6 million the organization paid out in the first quarter. That record total, the only that has topped $100 million in a single quarter, was attributed to "data cleanup and technology overhaul efforts."
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SoundExchange distributed $462 million in digital performing royalties in 2012 -- a 58% increase over 2011 -- the organization announced Wednesday.
The 22,000 payments, totaling $134.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2012, were 10% higher than the $122.5 million paid out in the previous quarter and 50.7% higher than the same quarter in 2011.
SoundExchange is the U.S. organization that distributes royalties for the digital performances of sound recordings by Internet radio, satellite radio and cable TV music channels. It has paid out over $1 billion to record labels and featured recording artists since its inception in 2003.
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Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek on Tuesday said his company expects to pay rights holders to the tune of half-a-billion dollars in 2013.
Ek, speaking at a technology and media event hosted by the Founders Forum in Los Angeles, said the amount Spotify is projected to pay artists, labels, publishers and other rights holders this year -- $500 million -- is equivalent to the total amount that the company had paid out since it launched its on-demand music streaming service in 2008.
By comparison, Pandora Media paid $230.2 million to rights holders in the four quarters ending Oct. 31, the latest period for which it reported its financial performance, and VEVO paid out $200 million since it launched in 2009.
Universal Music Group president of global digital business Rob Wells, who spoke at the same event, acknowledged that Spotify is a “substantial” source of revenue for the record company, making it unlikely that Universal would sever ties with the service when their licensing contract comes up for renewal.
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Terrestrial radio pays roughly 28% more to publishers per play, per listener than Pandora, according to Billboard estimates from numbers provided in blog posts by David Lowery and Jay Frank. But publishing is a small part of Pandora's royalties. When payments TO all parties (publishers, record labels, performing artists) are taken into account, Pandora's per-play, per-listener royalty is over 14 times that of terrestrial radio. Lowery's blog post about BMI royalties from radio and Pandora for his song "Low" has gained incredible attention (and 145 comments to date) for its detail and criticism (of Pandora's efforts to reduce what it pays publishers, labels and artists). Frank's follow-up post at his FutureHit.DNA blog includes audience data from Mediabase that allows for an apples-to-apples comparison. "Low" received $6,888.90 for 18,797 terrestrial radio plays and $84.45 for 1.159 million Pandora plays. (Both figures cover total payments to BMI. Lowery has a 40% writer's share. I assume the publisher takes a 50% share of royalties.) Since many people hear terrestrial radio plays but -- most likely -- only one person hears a Pandora play, it's difficult to compare $6,888.90 and $84.45.
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