Music Publishing

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

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