A look at some common (and often invisible) issues blocking your royalties and how to unblock them to get your revenue flowing.

The following article, from DMN partner Equalizer Consulting, offers a step-by-step framework for music businesses to develop a deliberate, documented metadata strategy.

An artist recently came to me because his entire catalog appeared to belong to somebody else.

The metadata at the work and recording level was accurate: titles, release dates, identifiers, etc. It was a case of mistaken identity. He happens to share a name with another artist, and a database had cross-referenced his entire discography with the other guy. That error propagated outward to databases supporting online searches so that his connection to decades of his own released music didn’t appear to be his.

More recently, I’m untangling something similar for a songwriter whose works, registered with their PRO, are crossed with another songwriter with the same name. We say that the unique IPI (Interested Parties Information) is important, and this is a prime example of why. I could speculate as to who submitted a registration using the wrong IPI number, but nothing in the process caught it because there was nothing to catch. A valid identifier had been entered, attached to a plausible name.

These are two clients on different sides of the coin, one recording and one publishing, with the same underlying failure. This failure crosses both sides, and both found their way to me.

So, I went back through various engagements I’ve worked on over the last year and looked at the patterns I’ve found. This exercise challenged my thinking because we generally assume bad data causes royalties to be blocked, and I believe that is still often true. That said, this review surfaced other valuable observations, even when the data appears completely fine.

My Methodology

I looked at a sample of eleven engagements I’ve worked on in the last year, plus a twelfth focused more on operational efficiency than catalog data (referenced where relevant). The clients include recording artists, featured performers, songwriters, composers, and small to mid-sized publishing catalogs. The catalog sizes range from a handful of works to well over tens of thousands of assets. I report all findings here in generic terms to protect my clients’ privacy.

It’s worth noting that this sample selected itself, as people often find their way to me when there is a problem, or they need things in place to scale, not because everything is already perfect.

 I will often say that my work is in prevention – putting the right processes and systems in place before something goes wrong. The truth is that it still usually starts with some level of audit and clean-up, even for the catalogs that come to me mostly organized.

This study tells us what breaks and what the early signals look like when something is wrong. What it can’t tell you is how often these problems go unnoticed, because I only see the ones brought to me for review. It’s worth stating that up front.

Three Ways To Not Get Paid

For this group of engagements, I’ve sorted the root cause into three primary categories. A catalog may exhibit issues from one or more of these:

  1. MISSING – meaning the registration or claim doesn’t exist where it needs to. This might mean that the work was never filed anywhere, or it was filed at one organization but not others.
  2. MISTAKEN – meaning the registration exists, but there is an issue with provenance. On the surface, everything looks fine, and the record is behaving normally. These can be the most challenging because the owner may be trying to prove a negative.
  3. CONFLICTING – there are two versions of the same truth, and neither is clearly authoritative. One organization says one thing, the other says another, and no adjudication exists in between. This could be due to differences between territories, collection processes, or record-keeping.

Missing is the most common and easiest to fix. Mistaken is the hardest to see. Conflicting is the one where nobody may be wrong at all, but it will require some research to figure that out.

These categories also don’t change with scale. A label could still have missing revenue channels where rights owner submissions aren’t kept up, or a publisher could inherit a catalog with partial MLC claims. Economies of scale bring different challenges, as you may only be able to focus on the highest revenue earners, which still leaves much to be resolved.

Missing

What is most interesting about the “missing” category is that it has little to do with data quality. 

More than half of the catalogs worked on had incomplete registrations and claims – not only partial gaps or stale information, but sometimes nothing at all with a key entity. The catalogs themselves were generally in good shape from a data perspective – clean distribution, ISRCs were in place, registrations complete in some places. The issue came from key entities being completely overlooked, most likely the MLC or the Rights Owner half of SoundExchange.

  • One had complete PRO registrations but had only claimed about 10% of their eligible catalog with SoundExchange.
  • One had complete SoundExchange artist claims, but had not done the same for their eligible recordings as a Rights Owner.
  • Four had their entire catalogs missing from The MLC.

These artists did the right thing by keeping documentation about their catalog, but opening the channels to collect revenue is still a different issue than clean documentation alone.

Payment doesn’t happen automatically just because the paperwork looks good. There are additional steps to take.

If you are an independent songwriter and take one thing from this, check your MLC account (or set one up if you haven’t yet). It’s quick to set up and was completely missing in four of these catalogs, and incomplete in almost all the others.

Mistaken

A case of mistaken identity is the most complex, as they behave differently from other data issues. A missing registration is easy to spot – it’s a blank, and those are easy for me to find in a catalog audit.

A registration attached to the wrong party doesn’t announce itself. The record exists and may appear both complete and legitimate. It passes the automated validation checks built into the various systems running the industry and may go unnoticed until human review takes place. Maybe it’s somebody else’s work sitting in your account, or even worse, it’s yours sitting in somebody else’s.

How would you discover that? What might tip you off that a record you’ve never even seen is collecting money erroneously? You might discover the problem by noticing statement details that don’t quite match, a credit that looks fine until you click and land on the wrong person, or a browser search that returns unexpected results.

Even if you do catch it, what mechanisms are in place to help you reconcile? In the artist’s case, I was able to track the error down to one database that had linked two artist discographies into one. In the songwriter’s case, this is still in progress, and I expect it will be months before the requested updates go into place. For an independent artist unfamiliar with how to do this, it can be overwhelming, and the path of least resistance may be to ignore it. For a label or publisher, they may have more resources, but that doesn’t necessarily make the work easier.

A related version of this that I’ve seen across catalogs of all sizes is title-level mismatching. Much of our industry is driven by backend matching, often without distinct identifiers to disambiguate. If a royalty matches two things based on title but they are in fact distinct and separate works, who do you report that error to, and how far along the reporting chain did it occur?

The argument for identifiers is to prevent this kind of thing from happening, but the act of assigning one doesn’t mean the work ends there. Where a public database is available, check your name, titles, and variants of both. Your account shows what’s already verified as yours, but additional public searches go further.

Conflicting

Two cases in this data set are worth noting. Both have domestic and international claims, with records that don’t fully reconcile between the collecting societies involved. It is easy to assume that one of them must be wrong; however, it turned out that neither party was in error – what qualifies, who’s entitled, and how a claim is constituted may not be the same in both places. A claim can be correct in one territory and appear incorrect in another, because the underlying rights differ slightly. Most of the work ends up requiring separating differences between errors and copyright law. 

Another example of this was evident in two recent comparisons I did between PROs and the MLC. In one, I compared and contrasted what each partially claimed, not only by title but also by double-checking entities and percentages. In the other, what appeared to be errors turned out to be differences in deal structure between mechanical and performance collection shares.

This wasn’t resolved in any database. Instead, we looked at statements and agreements to determine what supported the various claims. Correcting crossed writer registrations or a mixed-up discography may involve the same level of backtracking. 

I’m flagging this because not all differences mean someone made a mistake, and starting with that assumption means spending a lot of effort trying to correct a record that isn’t wrong. Adjudication can be legitimately hard and requires patience and relentless follow-up to get corrections made.

To do a check in this category, pull a selection of items from your catalog to review. Compare your registrations side by side to identify gaps and patterns. Even a comparison of twenty will tell you if there’s a larger issue at hand.

Slow And Steady, or Quick Wins

These three categories of issues don’t cost the same, either in time or money. A missing registration is the fastest and cheapest thing to fix. Mistaken identities and conflicts are a different order of magnitude: assembling evidence, corresponding with organizations to reconcile, waiting on corrections to be processed. Several of these are still open and have been running upwards of 6 months. It recently took me 3 months to get a single typo fixed with a PRO, so you’re in the hands of a third party with many catalogs to deal with and yours probably isn’t the most urgent.

Is it worthwhile pursuing? Each situation is different, and it’s worth looking at what’s sitting behind the problem. Missing registrations can pay for themselves if they unlock royalties. A crossed identity on a catalog might cost a lot more to resolve, but what is the hidden cost of leaving it alone when your artist identity is now fixed in the wrong place?

Expensive problems aren’t always the ones you can see, and may require cooperation to resolve. A methodical approach will be required, as you will likely find yourself feeling like you’re on a hamster wheel.

It’s Not All Bad

Many of the catalogs in this sample were actually in good shape, in terms of the accuracy of the data being held. Accurate data and collected revenue are two separate benchmarks. These had something in common that may not be expected, which wasn’t better systems or impressive software. Most of this was done in a spreadsheet. It wasn’t scale either, as there were similar findings across 15 song catalogs, just the same as 15,000 song catalogs. Catalogs of millions of songs aren’t immune to these issues either, but the resources available to catch and resolve them are different.

Successes came from those with receipts: split sheets, agreements, exports from third-party systems, and unhindered access to their own data. Those clients can tell me what they own, where potential issues are (even if they aren’t sure how to articulate the exact problem), and proactively update new information. I’ll probably still find 25% more ISRCs than they thought they had, but their foundation is solid.

These conflicts aren’t resolved by looking at databases alone. The need for good paperwork to settle issues extends beyond that.

Back To Prevention

As a result of this review, has my position on prevention changed?

 No. It’s still better to prevent something than try to fix it later; however, it has clarified how much might be out of your control. The other part is realizing that prevention doesn’t just mean doing something once. This work is unglamorous but essential and ongoing.

There is an element of consistent monitoring: 

  • looking for new information, such as a new cover version of a work
  • observing trends and anomalies, such as a positive or negative royalty fluctuation
  • revisiting existing catalog to look for new reporting, such as a new broadcast to claim with your CMO
  • comparing and contrasting data sources, such as different territories or rights types

If all of this seems overwhelming, it’s good to know when to call in a second pair of eyes. Even as somebody who looks at this type of thing all day, things can be easy to miss.

——————————————-

Natalie Jacobs is the founder of Equalizer Consulting, where she works with independent artists, labels, and publishers on metadata strategy and rights infrastructure. She spent over two decades at Warner Music Group, built the publishing and licensing data operations team, and mapped a 500,000-asset recording-to-work dataset, defining metadata standards across a catalog of 1.5 million. She works on a fiduciary basis: no commissions, no ownership claims, no percentage interest in your copyrights. If you ran one of the checks in this piece and didn’t like what you found, you may want to give her a call. https://equalizerconsulting.com