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This week we pick up where that one left off- what happens after the price has been paid and the claim has to become a working reality across every system that pays. Operators should be under no illusion that once a deal completes- the paperwork is signed (with the lawyers laughing all the way to the bank), the cash has gone out and the press release is scheduled- the real work begins. On paper, the catalog now belongs to the fund- but of course the industry's systems don't

A few weeks ago, in Rights Without Borders, I made the point that qualifying repertoire can be pulled out of collective management and licensed directly, while BIEM repertoire effectively cannot because in the BIEM world the society owns the mechanical right rather than merely administering it. The obvious follow-up question, and the one I get asked most often by publishers somewhere between independent and major, is: fine- but should we?

In the 1970s it took an average of 1.7 songwriters to write a hit, today it takes around 4.5. That's a 165% increase, and the number is still climbing- Beyoncé's ‘Heated' carries eighteen credited writers alone. Since the 90s there has been a slowly increasing trend to sample and interpolate, and it is quietly doing something to publishing data that the industry's registration systems were always unlikely to be able to absorb.

Last week we followed a single stream from a listener in Hamburg to a songwriter's bank account, and found it splitting into multiple royalty chains before it had travelled anywhere at all. There was one element we touched upon, but only at a high level: why the same song, streamed in the same place, can be processed through entirely different machinery depending on who wrote it.

The gap between the play and the payment is where the music industry lives, and it is almost completely invisible, including to plenty of people who work in music. This week let's follow one stream all the way through, and look at every place it can go wrong.

Dancing Queen is literally, T-000.000.001-0. So let's do something anyone reading this can replicate, and take a look at the databases- The MLC's public search, PRS's works search, ASCAP's and BMI's repertoire tools- and look up Dancing Queen to see how the ISWC has fared in its 30+ years of history.

The Leakage Ledger is a recurring edition where I’ll publish actual numbers from actual catalog work. Anonymised (obviously) and stripped of anything identifying- but real. One catalog, the findings, and what they were worth. No thesis to defend, just the pure maths. Tangible numbers- those that you can see, touch and feel, change that conversation. A publisher can't benchmark themselves against a sentiment, but they can absolutely benchmark themselves against a percentage.

Last year I wrote about real issues to be found in the MLC’s dataset- an exploration of what was really sitting inside the industry's most transparent copyright dataset. The headline then: the MLC reported around 90% of royalty value matched, while our analysis showed only 22% of ISRCs had been attributed to any work- some 170 million of 217 million recordings sitting unlinked, with the long tail holding more recoverable money than the industry's hits-first workflows were eve

Every catalog acquisition starts in the same place. A data room opens, and inside sits the familiar furniture: a stack of royalty statements, some contract summaries, perhaps a seller-commissioned earnings report with a decay curve that always seems to flatten out at exactly the right moment (funny that). And at the centre of it all, the schedule of works- the document that defines what is actually for sale.

Most catalog cleanup projects begin in a familiar place- are the right recordings attached to the right works. Are all the ISRCs present? Are they linked to the correct compositions? The difficulty is that recording-work matching relies on a much deeper assumption: that the list of works being matched to is itself clean.

US termination rights have been somewhat of an industry secret in times gone by- and understandably so given their creator friendly purpose. For any not familiar, this is the legal right of a songwriter to reclaim US rights they have previously transferred (say under a publishing deal) after 35 years. These sit quietly inside a catalog for years, sometimes decades, looking like a future technicality rather than a present commercial issue.

If publishers want to use AI meaningfully, they first need to know whether their own data is in a fit state to support it. Publishing data is not a neat database of facts waiting to be queried. It is a living, fragmented, territory-specific web of claims, registrations and human judgement. Anyone who has spent any length of time inside the operational machinery of publishing knows this instinctively- this is the world AI is entering.

AI is forcing every business to ask a difficult question: what work actually needs a human, and why? ‘Work’ is context, judgement, memory (personal and corporate), relationships, accountability, taste, intuition and the ability to discern why something matters in the first place. If those things are stripped out too quickly, the short-term efficiency gain can become a long-term organisational cost.

A significant portion of the last decade in the Music Industry has been spent discussing capital inflows. Billions has poured into catalogs, billions into infrastructure and billions into technology and platforms. This week the latest turn in that saga is being reported- that Sony Music Group is in advanced talks to acquire Recognition for $4Bn. This is particularly illustrative of a wider dynamic emerging across the market- how does the money leave?

There’s a predictable moment in the life of a growing business as operations, departments and processes mature and become engrained. More data, more stakeholders, more decisions. What once felt intuitive begins to feel fragmented, with questions taking longer to answer and conversations starting to loop. Teams begin to operate with slightly different assumptions and understandings about the same reality. Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel It is a natural evolution in the growth cyc

For all the noise around AI over the past year- new models, new capabilities, new fear- the most important developments haven’t been technical, but structural. In recent months, the UK government has tried to start defining an approach to one of the most consequential economic questions of the next decade: How do you build a world-leading AI sector without undermining the value of the content it depends on?

Everyone in publishing knows the simple truth- there shouldn’t be missing royalties in the digital age and there is a tax to identifying and retrieving them. The explosion in the number of recordings being released and songs being registered is still stretching the system- leaving billions in royalties that remain unclaimed or misallocated ($196m at The MLC minimum at the time of writing). If optimising royalties has a necessary cost, it begs a nuanced question: who should f

Since The MLC’s inception in 2018 through to the start of its start of distributions in 2021 and beyond it has been closely watched- by the market at large, by key stake holding publishers and by compatriot CMOs the world over. from next year there is to be a material change in how monies are distributed- Pro-rata payouts

As we all know, the conversation around music catalog investments has become increasingly sophisticated as the asset class has matured. The ability to identify, administer, and ultimately collect the income attached to rights is a deep specialism- and one that cannot be synthesized or sidestepped by AI.

In the past month alone we’ve seen three announcements that are as fascinating individually as they are illustrative collectively. Primary Wave in talks to acquire Kobalt. BMG reportedly exploring a deal for Concord. The now-concluded acquisition of Downtown by Universal Music Group Each headline by itself is significant, but taken together they suggest something more structural is currently at play. A re-majorisation of the music business.