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?

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.

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.

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.