Any artist making a real attempt at a career in the music
business should be familiar with the performance rights organizations ASCAP,
BMI, and SESAC. If you don’t know about
these organizations do an Internet search for their websites. Their job is to
collect and pay out any performance royalties you as an artist or publisher might
be owed from broadcasters, jukeboxes, etc. Make sure you check them all out
thoroughly before you submit an application. You can only affiliate with one of
the three and they are all different in the way the operate and run their
organizations.
But what about when your music is played on Internet radio,
satellite radio, or cable music services? In those situations these companies
have absolutely zero power to get you paid anything at all. Most new artists
either don’t know this fact or they aren’t aware that they are even owed money
from those establishments in the first place. This is where SoundExchange comes
in.
The Copyright Royalty Board, appointed by the Library of
Congress, has chosen SoundExchange to be the sole digital performing rights
organization in the United States. They have built an impressive track record
for defending the rights of the music industry over the last five years. Thanks to their efforts, in December of
2010, the Copyright Royalty Board decided to increase the per-performance
royalty rate almost fifty percent. According to the SoundExchange website, SoundExchange
has paid out over $537 million dollars in royalties since it’s inception.
There is another thing that sets SoundExchange apart from
the other performance rights organizations. In addition to songwriting and
publishing royalties, they collect royalties on behave of the owners of the
master recording copyrights. The copyright owner for a master recording is a
typically a record label. Sometimes though, particularly with unsigned artists,
the songwriter may own the copyrights to the master recordings or maybe a
publisher owns them. Either way, its money owed that the traditional radio broadcasters
have been weaseling their way out of paying for a long time.
No matter where you’re at in your career it’s a good idea to
register with SoundExchange so that you can get your digital performance
royalties if and when your music gets played in digital. If you don’t register,
you’ll have a pretty slim chance of getting paid your digital performance
royalties or even knowing when your music is being played digitally in the
first place.
To have career in music you have to make money in music. SoundExchange
is a good start.
