Why RoyaltyAmp has become the trusted partner for royalty collection, license compliance, and catalog protection
Leading Causes of Unpaid Royalties
Traditional Distribution and Administration is Broken
Media distribution has gone through dramatic shifts from physical-to-digital and now controlled to uncontrolled. The simplification of creation, globality of distribution, and ubiquity of sharing, has fostered a creator community that uploads billions of hours of content a day. Herein lies the problem. The majority of that content, often times containing copyrighted music does not go through an identification, licensing, or registration process. The result is massive errors and omissions in music rights attributions and royalty payments with up to 40% going unpaid or paid to the wrong party.
Our Forensic Techniques Have Grown Catalog Royalties from 20% to 500%
The info-graphic above presents music’s problem in a highly simplified manner.
Problem #1 - Unlicensed Distribution. There are two basic forms of distribution - licensed and unlicensed. Licensed distribution travels through music’s ecosystem in a generally properly registered, tracked, and paid process. Unlicensed distribution, however, is quite the opposite. Unlicensed distribution represents the majority of content uploads that occur daily and most often do not contain the data or rights attribution information for platforms and administrators to pay the proper artists, songwriters, labels, and publishers.
Problem #2 - No Authoritative Ownership Database. Digital Service Providers (DSPs) such as Apple, Spotify, and Amazon; and Online Content Sharing Service Providers (OCSSPs) such as YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram have no way to reference the content being uploaded against a database of who actually owns it. While it sounds like a simple problem to fix, it is not as content ownership and administration changes often and an authoritative database remains a relative impossibility.
The result of these two problems is that in order for any artist, songwriter, label, or publisher to get paid for all distribution and uses of their music they must find that content themselves, hence 35% or more of music’s earned royalties go unpaid or paid to the wrong party.
Problem #3 - Too Many Services Required. The music ecosystem challenges and failures are no secret. Hundreds of companies have developed bespoke technologies and services to address and resolve them. There are those who focus on metadata cleanup, some audit registrations, others mine and claim rights on services like YouTube and Facebook, while a number scan and monitor broadcast airwaves and other distribution outlets. The reality is in order to effectively monitor, mine, claim, and collect all of one’s earnings, they must have a portfolio of service and solution providers and a team capable of managing their implementation, progress, and on-going results. So how would any artist, songwriter, label, or publisher possibly know what they need or how to manage the broad number of suppliers required?
