Learning From The "Uptown Funk" Royalty Split

"Uptown Funk" is one of the biggest selling songs in a long time, proving that people really do like the funk. How big? Just check these figures out.

• 627 million YouTube views
• 5.5 million units in the US alone
• 95,000 album sales

What's interesting is that the songwriting credits were originally split between artist and producer Mark Ronson, the featured Bruno Mars, Phillip Martin Lawrence and Jeffrey Bhasker.

After the song became a hit, many more were added to the list however, most recently Nicholas Williams and producer Devon Gallaspy, the creators of "All Gold Everything". Why? Because there was a sample from the song in "Uptown Funk"  (I don't hear the similarity myself). This was good enough to gain 15% of the huge hit, which amounted to about $400,000 until now.

But there's more. Two months ago the representatives of The Gap Band put in a claim on YouTube that "Funk" was close to their "Oops Upside Your Head" (this one you can hear the similarity in the bass line) and each of the four writers there were give 3.4% of the song as a result.

The moral of the story here is that since the "Blurred Lines" court case, everyone is being a lot more cautious about songwriting credit.

This will probably become a standard form of doing business from now on unfortunately, and will only change if the "Blurred Lines" decision is reversed on appeal. Welcome to the new world of songwriting.

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7 Mistakes To Avoid When Registering Songs

Recently the Songtrust blog ran an excellent article regarding the 7 mistakes that writers make when registering theirs songs with a Performance Rights Organization (PRO) like ASCAP, BMI or SESAC.

Ryan Brodhead, the manager of performance rights administration for Songtrust, wrote that these were the following mistakes that he sees all too often.

1. All performers of the song are not listed.

2. All the writers and publishers and their correct shares are not listed.

3. Any alternate titles (like those used for some music libraries) are not listed.

4. The writer/publisher account doesn't have the correct contact information.

5. All samples aren't licensed or cleared.

6. Songs have names that are not clear or too difficult to remember.

7. Songs that are performed live aren't listed with the proper PRO.

Filing the correct paperwork is a vital part of modern songwriting, so take it seriously and get it right. Make sure that you don't make one of these mistakes so that royalty check shows up when you expect it.

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You're Not Getting Your Royalties

Last week Jeff Price, the founder and CEO of TuneCore, wrote a very profound piece on the Hypebot blog about the amount of songwriting royalties that aren't making it back to the songwriter, especially from digital sales. It's always been a given that a major label would do everything it could not to pay you any royalties at all, but the following goes way beyond our worse nightmares.

This is a very long post, but well worth the read if you have any sales at all.
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"While the major music companies' revenue from music sales has gone down, they have a brand new increasing income stream: revenue generated from the sale of other people's music. In the past five years, hundreds of millions of dollars of songwriter royalties have been generated and never paid to the songwriter, or have been given to Warner Bros, EMI, Universal, Sony and others based on their market share- estimates put this new income at over half a billion dollars.

Once these companies get the money, they keep it and don't account to anyone.

All the while, the songwriters that earned this money have no clue their pockets are being picked, their royalties are not being paid, and their rights are being violated.

I discovered this infringement and lack of royalty payments while embarking on a journey to discover how much money TuneCore Artists earned as songwriters. In the past three years, TuneCore Artists have sold over 500 million songs and earned over a quarter billion dollars from the sale of the recordings of their songs. With the help of Jamie Purpora, the former SVP Bug Music Publishing Administration and now President TuneCore Songwriter Publishing Administration, we identified another $60 to $70 million earned by these artists in songwriter royalties. The upsetting part, over 70% of this money never made it back to them. And keep in mind, I'm only talking about artists that use TuneCore—there are many more.

This infringement and lack of payment is one of the biggest outrages of the music industry and yet it is rarely talked about and even more rarely understood.

It needs to stop.

Let me explain the nutshell version of how it happens.

The new music industry is global. However, outside of the United States, digital services require additional rights, use different royalty rates and pay the owed royalties differently than the United States music industry. The end result is:

• The digital music service does not get all the rights needed from songwriters and therefore never pay the songwriter the money he/she is owed. 
• At the same time, local performing rights and collection agencies outside the U.S. illegally take a % of the songwriter's money while making it impossible for the songwriter to get what's left over. 
• This illegally obtained songwriter royalty money is then given to other major music companies in that country. 

These other major music companies knowingly take other people's royalties from the collection agencies. (Why not, it's free money earned off of music sales from songs they don't represent that they do not have to pay royalties on).

This scheme is beyond outrageous, it's wrong, it needs to stop (and it's why we launched the TuneCore Songwriter Service).

How do they get away with it, three reasons:

1) The existing global songwriter administration system was built for analog, not digital.
The old school music industry was built for the world of analog TV, AM/FM radio and 12" pieces of vinyl or 5" circular pieces of plastic; it was not built for the digital world. However, this old "analog" system is used for the administration of royalties from the digital world causing other people's money not to make it to them. The "analog" songwriter collection and administration industry knows this is occurring but has no motivation to change its existing system as it allows them to take/earn hundreds of millions of dollars off of other people's royalties.

2) It's cheaper to violate copyright than pay songwriters.
The new emerging digital music services have no simple solution to get licenses from and make payments to copyright holders; it's a pain, it's complicated, and, for the moment, it's cheaper to take on the potential legal liability than invest resources and time to comply with the law and pay the right people.

3) The complexity of copyright law and a lack of transparency create huge barriers to understanding.
The complexity of copyright law, the total lack of transparency by the collection agencies and the inability to audit anything, and you have a perfect storm for global copyright infringement with hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's money getting siphoned off and/or not paid to the millions of rightful copyright holders."

Please read the rest of this post since it has information that's vital to your well-being as a songwriter.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Royalty And Fee Sources For Songwriters

Here's a great post from the Songtrust blog that comes by way of Ariel Hyatt's Cyber PR. It lists 30 possible sources of income for songwriters. Here are just two of the categories:

Performance Royalties

1. TV (royalties are paid by the TV station for the broadcast of a show, film or commercial with your music on it. This is not to be confused with the actual placement of your songs in TV, film or commercials which is a sync royalty.)

2. Radio

3. Live venues

4. Restaurants

5. Bars

6. Movie theaters

7. Elevator music services

8. Supermarkets

9. Clothing stores

10. Gyms

11. When your music is sampled 

12. Jukebox

Mechanical Royalties

13. Ringtones / ringbacks

14. Recorded cover songs

15. Record sales

16. Film soundtracks

17. Karaoke recordings 

18. Greeting cards

You can see the other 3 categories of songwriter income by going directly to the article on the Songtrust blog.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Songwriters May Soon Get Their Rights Back

Recently there have been articles all over the Internet and newspapers about how songwriters like Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen will be able to get their some of their publishing rights back very soon.

The reason is that in 1978, Congress passed a new Copyright Law that stated that after 35 years, songwriters would be able to reclaim publishing rights from record labels. That date is coming on January 1, 2013, after which artists will have a five year window from the time their song was created in which they can petition to reclaim their rights. Artists still must file termination notices at least two years before the date they want to recoup their work, and if they fail to act, their right to reclaim their work lapses.

So why would a record label own their publishing in the first place? Even back before so called "360 deals," record labels knew that the real money in the music business was in publishing, so a stipulation of most recording contracts was that they would assign their publishing to the company's publishing company. For a new artist this wasn't such a bad thing, since that usually meant that they got an additional advance, and a large publishing company could place the songs in places (like movies) that a small one didn't have access to.

Still, after you've had some success and you see at least a quarter (maybe even half) of your songwriting income going to the label's publisher, it does give one pause. Today there are so many less expensive alternatives to a major publisher that it would seem that the only songwriters who pass up this opportunity will be those with real estate attorneys acting as entertainment attorneys. Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Loretta Lynn have all filed petitions already; they'll get the snowball rolling down the hill. Are you or someone you know eligible?

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Today's Artist Is A Songwriter

Digital Music News offered an interesting article the other day regarding the fact that 83 percent of all mainstream songs were at least partially written by the artist or a member of the band. This came after searching the databases of ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, and cross-referencing the top 100 songs on Big Champagne's Ultimate Chart.

While bad news for so-called "professional" songwriters, this is generally good news for the public, since an artist is truly an "artist" if he or she has some hand in the songs performed, and that tends to be the kind of artists that we really appreciate as fans. That being said, songwriting credit is dubious sometimes (like producer credits on a television show or movie), so unless you were actually in the room when the song was written, you'll never know for sure who exactly wrote what.

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.