Latest / Clone Wars: The Spinoff / Register to Get Paid: Close the Royalty Gaps

Transcript

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Welcome back to Clone Wars: The Spinoff.
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DJ Universe here, and the whole table is full today.
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Dangerous Zygos, Calvin Blingwell, and Greedy Boi are all in the building.
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Today's episode is Register to Get Paid.
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Quick note up front: everything we say is educational, not legal or financial
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advice.
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Last episode we mapped the pipelines, talked split sheets, talked first filings.
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Today we go forensic.
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We audit the catalog, find the leaks, and fix them before a clock runs out.
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And that clock is the whole point.
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Let's start with Knowledge, the number one in Supreme Mathematics.
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Knowledge of self, and knowledge of the asset.
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Most artists think they own one thing when they drop a record.
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They own two.
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There's the sound recording, the master, which is the actual recording people hear.
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And there's the composition, the lyrics and the melody underneath it.
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Two assets, two sets of rights, two different groups collecting money.
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I live on the master side, so let me put it in studio terms.
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The master is the bounce.
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The file I send you after the mix and master.
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The composition is what you could write on paper or hum without any beat at all.
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Same song, but a bank treats them as separate accounts.
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And each one gets its own ID.
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The master gets an ISRC, an International Standard Recording Code,
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twelve characters, assigned at the track level, usually by your distributor or
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label.
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The composition gets an ISWC, and the writers and publishers get IPI numbers,
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sometimes called CAE numbers.
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So the streaming platform sees the ISRC.
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That's what it logs.
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Where does the composition ID come in?
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That's the problem.
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Platforms track plays by the recording.
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If nobody ever links that ISRC to the composition in the databases that pay
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songwriters, the publishing side of that stream has no payout address.
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Researchers call it the mapping gap.
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Money gets made, and it just sits in a holding account.
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Which brings the hard truth.
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Royalties do not flow automatically from your distributor.
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Your distributor is a gateway.
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It delivers your master to Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon,
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and it collects the master side of interactive streaming and downloads.
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It is not out there collecting everything else.
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The upload and pray method is not a business plan.
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In the Five Percent language, it's the first thing we Destroy before we Build.
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I'm hungry, so I want all of it.
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If I'm leaving a pipeline unfilled, that's food I'm watching somebody else eat.
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Let's walk the pipelines one by one.
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Understanding is number three.
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Clear perception, no blind spots.
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So we name the four pipelines.
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Pipeline one is the distributor, which we covered: master side,
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interactive streams and downloads.
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Pipeline two is the PROs.
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In the United States that's ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and Global Music Rights.
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They collect public performance royalties for the composition.
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Radio, television, streaming, clubs, live venues.
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And the structure matters for the money.
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PRO payouts split into a writer share and a publisher share,
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half and half.
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That's not a negotiation, that's the system.
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Here's where the independent trap shows up.
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If you're self published with ASCAP, you generally need to register a publishing
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entity, the vanity publisher, to be able to claim that publisher half.
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Without it, you leave half the performance money unclaimed.
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With BMI, an unaffiliated writer can collect the full amount directly.
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Either way, a songwriter can only be with one PRO at a time.
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ASCAP and BMI are open to writers.
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SESAC and GMR are for profit and invite only.
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Which is why discipline beats hype.
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People chase invites when an open door is already sitting there.
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Pick one, register properly, set up the entity.
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Pipeline three is the one folks forget.
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The MLC, the Mechanical Licensing Collective.
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It came out of the Music Modernization Act of 2018, and the blanket license went
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live on January 1, 2021.
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It collects U.S.
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mechanical royalties from interactive streaming and downloads and pays the owners of
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the composition.
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So wait, if I'm registered with a PRO, I'm good on mechanicals?
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No, and that's the myth.
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Registering with a PRO does not register you with the MLC.
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Performance and mechanical are separate royalty types.
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You register with the MLC directly, or through an administrative publisher who does
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it for a commission.
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Pipeline four is SoundExchange.
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It collects digital performance royalties for the master, for noninteractive plays.
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Think satellite radio, webcasters, Pandora's radio style streams.
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The statutory split is fifty percent to the sound recording copyright owner,
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forty five percent to the featured artist, and five percent for non featured session
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players and backup vocalists.
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Here's the financial literacy part.
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If you're an independent who owns your master and performs on it,
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you register as Both.
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Performer and rights owner.
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Pick only one role and you're leaving roughly half that check on the table.
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And here's a fact that hits different for rappers.
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In the U.S., regular AM and FM radio pays composition royalties through the PROs,
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but by federal law it doesn't pay sound recording royalties to the performer or the
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master owner.
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Other countries do handle that differently.
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So a song getting spun on terrestrial radio can pay the writer side and still not
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trigger the master side here.
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Writing and owning matters twice as much.
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Four pipelines.
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Four different doors.
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And none of them open because you uploaded a file.
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Now Wisdom, number two.
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Wisdom is knowledge in motion.
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Everything we just said is useless if the data is dirty, so let me talk about
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metadata like it's mix hygiene.
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A clean session gets a clean record.
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Dirty data gets rejected by systems that can't read it.
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What counts as dirty?
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Misspelled featured artists.
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Typing feat.
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in the song title instead of using the contributor field, which can break the match
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on the publishing side.
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Duplicate or reused ISRCs.
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A typo in your legal name.
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A missing IPI number.
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One research breakdown from Music Money Makeover calls the black box largely a
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database management and synchronization failure between distributors and collection
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agencies, and that tracks with what I see.
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Platforms can't match a stream to a verified owner, so the money gets parked.
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That's a branding issue too.
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Your name is your brand.
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If it's spelled three ways across three systems, the system sees three different
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people.
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Exactly.
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So here's my fix.
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Build a Master Metadata Sheet.
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Spreadsheet, Notion, whatever you use.
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Legal name, artist name, IPI or CAE number, every song title,
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every ISRC, every ISWC once it exists, every cowriter.
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Then the rule: copy and paste.
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Never retype.
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Character perfect, every portal, every release.
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So when I'm back in the booth turning a freestyle into a single,
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the sheet gets built before the upload, not after.
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Before.
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And then comes the bridge.
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After the song is live, log into your PRO portal and the MLC,
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find the registered work, and attach the recording's ISRC to the composition.
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That's closing the mapping gap by hand.
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The research says registration with one does not automatically carry to the other,
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so you confirm in each place.
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And now we audit.
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This is where we move past basic filings.
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Search the MLC's unclaimed works tools for your own songs.
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Check the unmatched lists at your PRO and at SoundExchange.
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If your song shows up as unmatched, that is a flag with your name on it.
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Claim it, fix the link, and do it while the money is still being held.
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I love that.
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An audit isn't a punishment.
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It's a treasure hunt, and the treasure is already yours.
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Let me bring the road into this, because monetization is a stack,
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not a single move.
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Shows, merch, features, and then the quiet one, live performance royalties.
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When you perform your songs in licensed venues, the composition can generate
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performance royalties through your PRO.
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That's the PRO pipeline working at the club level.
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But the PRO doesn't magically know your setlist.
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Right.
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That's why PROs offer programs like ASCAP OnStage and BMI Live,
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where you can submit your tour dates and setlists.
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Check the current rules and eligibility for your own PRO, because programs change.
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But the habit is simple.
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Every show, I log the venue, the date, and the songs I performed.
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It takes minutes at the merch table between selfies.
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That's money stacked on top of the guarantee and the hoodie sales,
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not instead of them.
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And it only works if the songs are registered under the right names.
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Setlist logging on a track that isn't in the system is just writing a diary.
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Which leads to Equality, the number six.
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Splits have to equal exactly one hundred percent on paper.
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If you and a cowriter claim shares that add up to more than that,
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registrations can go into dispute and payments can freeze.
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And watch the scale.
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Some portals use a hundred percent total, others use a two hundred percent scale,
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a hundred for the writers and a hundred for the publishers.
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Mix those up and the registration gets flagged.
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This is why we do the split sheet in the studio, while everybody's still friends and
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the vibes are good.
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Now the clock.
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The Music Modernization Act requires the MLC to hold unmatched royalties for a
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minimum period, and the statutory minimum is three years.
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After that, unmatched money becomes eligible to be distributed by relative market
10:00
share to copyright owners the MLC has already identified.
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So in plain English, if your song stays unmatched, the unclaimed money can end up
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following the biggest catalogs.
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So the little guy ends up feeding the big guy.
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That's the structure, yeah.
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One more honest note.
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A Copyright Office report in 2021 recommended that the MLC hold unclaimed royalties
10:25
longer than the statutory minimum, so the real timing can be longer than three
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years.
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But you don't build your plan around a maybe.
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SoundExchange also holds back royalties for a period, reportedly three years
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according to Ari Herstand, so register early and you may be able to collect what's
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been waiting.
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Check each organization's current rules.
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Early files get found.
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Late files get lectured.
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Last number, eight.
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Build and Destroy.
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We destroyed the upload and pray myth.
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Now we build infrastructure that outlives the single.
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Let's run the checklist, five moves, in order.
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Move one.
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Build your Master Metadata Sheet.
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Legal name, artist name, IPI or CAE number, titles, cowriters,
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ISRCs, ISWCs, and split percentages that equal exactly one hundred.
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Copy and paste only.
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That's discipline, and discipline is what makes a catalog inheritable.
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Move two.
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Deliver clean through your distributor.
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Use the sheet, put featured artists in the contributor field and not the title,
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and record the ISRC for every track.
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Remember, the distributor handles the master side of interactive streaming.
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It doesn't do the rest of the job.
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Move three.
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Register with one PRO, and handle the publisher share.
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If you're self published with ASCAP, set up your publishing entity.
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If you're unaffiliated with BMI, know how that works for you.
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Or look at an administrative publisher if you'd rather have help,
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but understand they take a commission.
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Then log your shows with ASCAP OnStage or BMI Live, depending on where you landed.
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Move four.
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Register your works with the MLC, or through an administrative publisher.
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Then link each recording's ISRC to its composition.
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Search the unclaimed works tools for your own titles, and clean up any over claimed
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splits.
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Move five.
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Register at SoundExchange as Both, performer and rights owner,
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if you own your master and you perform on it.
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And put a reminder on the calendar to audit the whole catalog regularly,
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before the holding periods run out.
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Here's why this is generational.
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Money that's never claimed doesn't just disappear.
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It goes somewhere.
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Registered, linked, accurate paperwork is what lets a catalog be passed down as a
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real asset.
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Your kids don't inherit a feeling.
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They inherit documents.
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And the road pays for the lesson.
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Every city, every setlist, every hoodie sold is a chance to stack,
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if the backend is built right.
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I promised I'm gonna eat it all, so I'm checking every pipeline.
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Not just one plate.
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That's the episode.
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Know the asset.
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Link the codes.
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Balance the splits.
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Beat the clock.
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And again, this is education, not legal or financial advice,
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so confirm details with the organizations and a qualified professional.
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Thanks for rolling with Clone Wars: The Spinoff.
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