Music Publishing

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

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.

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

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.

“We are a defacto data company. We don’t work in the music industry- we work in the data industry.” This quote from Caroline Champarnaud of SACEM speaks deeply to the operational reality of a modern collecting society- though it resonates far beyond that context, into the very fabric of music publishing and copyright administration in the modern age. The more I’ve thought about it since, the more it feels like an accurate description of the publishing ecosystem.

Last week I was at Music Ally Connect in London- and as you can well imagine AI took it’s usual place as the topic du jour. Despite being well trodden ground there was some fascinating elements- both trends from the day at large and specific comments that gave insight to how the Music industry is currently both thinking about and preparing for (/guarding against) AI. Mostly these broadly fell into 3 camps- intense negativity, bullish positivity and cautious ambivalence.

Music is one of the most culturally powerful forces on earth. It anchors memories, shapes identities, moves crowds, ignites movements, defines decades, and travels further and faster than almost any other creative expression. It also underpins nearly every other entertainment and social experience we care about. And yet… commercially and systemically, it is profoundly undervalued.

For years music publishers have learned to live within a strange paradigm. Chatter around the industry is endlessly about innovation, data, efficiency and the collaboration required to realise gains for all. Yet for all the discussion, the data sets relied upon for collecting and attributing royalties continue to operate with significant limitations- none of which need to be spelled out here. Publishers, despite best efforts, often only discover issues after value has already

There’s a recurring dichotomy in how music publishing ‘value’ is discussed. The media conversation clusters around the headline acquisition of iconic catalogs and blockbuster songwriters- the “big deals” naturally command attention. They are tangible, easy to explain, and fit the narrative that music IP behaves like a financial asset. However there is also a real engine of value outside those deals that make the music headlines. There is still material revenue to be found ac

For decades, sub-publishers formed the backbone of the global music publishing network- local partners handling collections, licensing, and promotion in markets where a publisher lacked direct presence. They were the trusted representatives on the ground, fluent in the local language, culture, and society politics and nuance. But in today’s hyper-connected, digitally-driven industry, consumption has become overwhelmingly global.

The music industry runs on identifiers. Without them, the complex ecosystem of recordings, compositions, rights, and royalties would quickly collapse into chaos (... more so than it already is). The two most critical identifiers are ISRC and ISWC- the codes that uniquely define distinct audio recordings and song compositions respectively. Their existence looks simple on the surface, but they represent both different philosophies and underpin key workflows and challenges in at

From continuous large scale investments and strategic manoeuvres to tales of narrowing margins and constant restructuring, the music publishing industry seems caught in a tension between optimism and anxiety. On the one hand, Goldman Sachs’ Music in the Air 2025 and Bolero’s subsequent analysis paint a bullish medium and long-term picture. Meanwhile, publishing revenues alone- according to Goldman Sachs- are projected to rise more modestly.

The music publishing industry is no stranger to disruption. Every year seems to bring a new wave of technological, economic, or cultural change that evolves how music is consumed, and subsequently licensed and monetised. Keeping a keen eye on the data for areas of potential growth provides rights holders with a super power. Seeing what opportunities are developing, at what rate, and what the uplift is likely to look like as the revenue converts down the pipeline- particularly

The music industry has never been short on creativity- but in the smaller Publishing niche it’s often been sadly short on collaboration. Not between songwriters, producers, or artists- but between the organisations, systems, and standards that underpin how the business actually serves these creators. For an industry built on relationships, too much of our data and infrastructure operates like a walled garden.

We’ve all had that feeling. You suddenly hear a new song on the radio. A friend mentions it. Then it pops up in a reel, a TV ad, a shop playlist... suddenly, it’s everywhere. But somewhere along the way, without even realising it- you start to like it. Maybe even love it. You Shazam it. Save it. Play it again later. It becomes your go-to. You don’t quite know how it happened… but it did.

After data (which, have no fear, is going to feature) the economic landscape for music publishing in a digital world is one of my favourite topics to explore. Well… alongside licensing frameworks, systemic politics, global society pipelines- which are all, of course, different facets of the same dynamic. Whichever way you look at it, songs don’t receive value on par with what’s shared by the rest of the industry. And even when value is ascribed, it’s struggling to get through