The UK's MMF asks for "greater transparency" in $ong royalty management

By Emmanuel Legrand

The UK's Music Managers Forum has asked for "greater transparency" in the administration and processing of royalties in a new report titled 'Dissecting The Digital Dollar – The $ong Royalty Guide', produced by CMU Insights.  

  The British organisation said that data around royalty chains, rights ownership, admin fees and payment schedules "must be made available" to improve transparency.

  "Given the complexities of the global digital licensing landscape, it has become too onerous and expensive for all but the most successful songwriters to track and trace their royalties," reads the report. 

"This needs to change. Collecting societies and music publishers must embrace transparency and move towards making crucial data freely available as standard practice – and especially information relating to the ownership of rights, the royalty chains being employed, and any deductions and delays that occur as money moves along those chains."

Fit for purpose

  Other recommendations from the report include:

> Reveal the disputes: Collecting societies and music publishers "should proactively alert songwriters when disputes occur with their rights that could halt payments."

> Global licensing: The MMF calls for a reduction of the number of links in the royalty chains. "New services and new markets should not be licensed locally, and license renewals should be global wherever possible," said the MMF.

> Quicker payments: Songwriters should be paid within nine months of a track being streamed "as an absolute minimum."

> Black Box reform: The MMF requires that attributable or uncollected streaming revenues "should never be redistributed by market share" and called for consultation within the songwriting community "to find alternative distribution processes."

> Campaign for change: The MMF asked for songwriters, managers and accountants to "push their publishers and collecting society partners to actively and urgently address licensing inefficiencies."

  “Streaming should be boosting songwriters’ incomes, instead MMF research reveals much of their money is subject to unnecessary data disputes, deductions and delays," commented MMF CEO Annabella Coldrick. "Long and complex royalty chains need to be simplified and shortened so more of the money gets back to the creator of the music. Digital licensing needs to be fit for purpose.”