A million dollars in nickels and dimes

A million dollars in nickels and dimes

Search
Skip to content
  • About Me

Monthly Archives: May 2016

MediaNet Acquired by SOCAN

May 20, 2016 amyvandergon Leave a comment

If you’re reading this, you probably have heard my company’s big news by now: we’ve been acquired by the performing rights organization SOCAN. I hadn’t written anything about it until now because I’ve been traveling and jet-lagged, but I’m very excited about this development.

There’s a lot of talk in the industry about “transparency”, which I’ve written about before. SOCAN is working to make it easier for music content creators to track their payments, and the integration of our rich data into their business will get them there. As I’ve written before, we’re obsessive about data accuracy!

The refrain we hear a lot is that of the “black box” in the music industry. I don’t favor that term because it hints at nefarious, sleight-of-hand activities. While that may have been present in the past – the mob was involved in the industry, after all – I don’t think that’s the case today. There are just a lot of parties involved in the release of a recording.

Here is the quick explanation of music rights that friends sometimes ask me to give (after a couple of beers): When you listen to a song on a digital service, there are a lot of entities that are entitled to money. First, someone – or maybe a couple of someones – wrote the song, so they’re considered the songwriter. Their money is collected by a publishing company, which the songwriter may have established themselves, or maybe they asked an existing publisher to handle it for them. The songwriter is also represented by a performing rights organization (PRO), which is kind of like a songwriter’s union. (SOCAN is a PRO.) Next, you have a recording artist. This may be the same person as the songwriter, or it could be someone totally different. Maybe there’s a band, or studio musicians, so they all earned money on this play. In the traditional case, they have the backing of a record label, who signed a contract with them. This contract may have covered things like a cash advance to the recording artist so they could make a record. The label also handles things like touring, merchandise, and marketing for the artist. (They sometimes have a claim to some of that publishing income, but that’s a topic for a different day.) Maybe the label is a small one, so they rely on a distributor to get their music out into the world.

These entities all have contracts to get paid for the services they provide. These agreements are made behind closed doors, so – for instance – while a recording artist may know the terms of their contract with a record label, they aren’t a party to the contract between their record label and a streaming music service.

Some of this “black box”-ness is necessary, so it’s always going to be there. What we can – and should – fix, though, is the links between all the parties that should get paid through a play. There is currently no global rights database, so sometimes it’s not obvious who contributed to a recorded track. It’s the industry’s biggest problem, and it’s one we’re working to fix.

LabelsMediaNetMetadataMusic IndustryPublishersSOCANSongwritersTransparency

Tags

Alabama Shakes Amazon Music Amen break Apple Music Beach House Beastie Boys Beats Music Best Of Bon Iver Chemical Brothers Congress Curation Cut Copy Dr. Dre Every Child Achieves Act FKA Twigs HD Music Jamie xx KEXP Mariah Carey Metadata Music Downloads Music Education Music Industry Music Review Music Technology Playlist Radio Radiohead review Ryan Adams Sampling Spotify Starbucks Stephen Witt Steve Reich Streaming Music Summer Music Talking Heads Tame Impala Taylor Swift The Echo Nest Tidal Transparency Veruca Salt

A Music Blog

Recent Posts

  • Did Ed Sheeran Copy Marvin Gaye and Ed Townsend?
  • Recommended Listening
  • Learning to Teach Music
  • Here’s to the Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me
  • 9.99

Recent Comments

    Archives

    • May 2023
    • September 2021
    • July 2018
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • May 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015

    Categories

    • Uncategorized

    Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries RSS
    • Comments RSS
    • WordPress.org
    Proudly powered by WordPress