Running your songwriting business | PRO royalty collection

Pro Songwriting Masterclass | Helienne Lindvall (Roger Sanchez, Sunloverz, Big Daddy Wilson, The Dark Tenor ...)

Welcome everybody. I’m really, really excited to have you here and to share  all this information with you. I’m gonna, turn on my keynote, and I’m gonna share my screen  and then I’m gonna  turn on the  keynote and start playing.  There we go.  Alright, well, this, obviously this is the,  my class on,  running, running your songwriter business, how to get paid and credited correctly,  ’cause none of us really get into music to be an administrator.

But if we wanna get credited and paid correctly, we do need to know,  the ins and outs of,  how it works. And it’s not that easy. It’s quite complicated in the music industry because everything has kind of been built on from when we had,  vinyl and then we had CDs, and then we had downloads, and then we had streaming.

And all of them are paid differently. And, and you have a different collection collecting societies for them. so  simple, we started out what is a song, and we all kind of, you know, think we know what a song is. You know, it’s  what’s played on the radio or on your, our,  sound system or,  in our smartphone.  And that’s what we hear. But actually, a  song is a lot of different, like, it contains a lot of different information.

 So you have, you know, the publishers, the pros, the songwriters, the split discussions, IWCs. And then when you get down to the credits even further, the engineers, the alternative titles. ’cause you might have seen that if you belong to A-A-P-R-O that they’re, they ask for alternative titles and who produced it, who played on it, what the splits are, and then everything else, alternative lyrics.

 So,  as I said, you know, what, what we want as songwriters is we wanna get paid and we wanna get credit credited  correctly. So the,  there are a few different groups sitting between us and the DSPs and the consumer.  So let me just,  wait.

 So you see the consumer,  for the consumer’s wanting to go to the musician, you do actually, the, these, companies in between, have to have the information, the correct information.  So you can see the rights companies, the, you have the ps, which is like the Ask Up and BMIs and PRS,  and you also had the publishers, which is Cobalt and Disney and  Sony TV and Warner Music.

and they need to then give the information to the, DSPs.  And that’s how you get taped. So  we have, now we’re gonna start with what differences that exist in music. So there’s two sides to a record or a song. It’s the composition and it’s the recording.  And the recording is also called the Master, the master Rights.

And that usually belongs to the record company. Or if you, you are self releasing  that it belongs to you, the composition.  It belongs to all the songwriters involved and their publishers.  So first, we’ll look at their recording and master rights.  So you have the record label that might own it, and they will have their own individual,  code  to make sure that they, they get paid.

Okay?  And you have the digital distributors that di distributes your music. If you are a self releasing artist,  you have a collective management organization. and those are in different countries. There could be a gram mix in Scandinavia or, or Saami in Sweden. It could be sound exchange in the us in, in the UK it’s PPL.

 So they will,  they, they will,  collect the money if the song is broadcast. So that means if your song is on the radio,  or on television, they will collect money for that. If it’s being played in a shop or in, in,  hairdressers, they’ll also collect money for that.  But if your so song is being streamed  on Spotify or, or any of those services,  you,  the BPL and Gram and Sammy don’t collect for that, that money goes directly to the record label or the digital distributor.

 On the composition side, you have publishers and performing rights organizations,  pros, so to speak. They can also be called CMOs.

That’s collective management organizations.  And  so that’s the difference between them, is that one collects full performance and the other one collects for mechanicals.  mechanicals, we’re gonna get to. So PRS as ascap,  EM and gma, they’re the pros. And Sony Universal, they’re the publishers, of course. so you need to be, registered with a PRO and CMO to be able to get,  paid for if it, your music is being streamed or if it’s being,  played on the radio or on television.

 So, and I saw a question about that before about, you know, being a member of PRS. A lot of people will say, I, I will now speak from a, a UK,  side to make it simpler.  a lot of people will say, well, there’s no point in me registering with A-A-P-R-O,  because I’m not making any money.

But you’re also not gonna make any money unless you register with a PRO.  And the reason that some pros or,  many pros will, will have,  an a charge in the initially for you to sign up is because it’s quite a lot of, of work for them to administer an account. saying that it’s different in different countries. There are are certain pros that don’t charge anything and other pros that do.

 And if you are in Europe, then you can actually choose which PRO you wanna be with. If you wanna be, if you are in Sweden, for example, your local PRO will be stem. but you might wanna register with PRS instead and be a member there because most of your music is being streamed in the UK and not in Sweden. or if most of your music is being streamed in Germany, you might wanna be with Gamma instead.

however, if you, if you become a member of A PRO in a different country, that means that there’s gonna be, they’re gonna have to transfer the money to you from where, where they are. And that, might incur some, exchange charges when they, when they,  put it into your bank account.  You also do not have to be a member of PRO in all different countries, because if you’re a member of one PRO, they have agreements with all the other ps.

So if I, my music is played in Germany or France, then GEMA and SEM will collect the money and send it to PRS, and PRS will pay it to me.  You can also be a member of  more than one PRO if you want to. So, for example, I am a member of STEM for,  the Nordic countries because some of my music is in Swedish,  so it’ll only made in the Nordic countries.

so that, that music, I want to be collected at source  and for outside of the Nordic countries, PRS is my PRO. And in the us, you can actually then choose which PRO you’re gonna be with. So even though there’s, they will collect in the US and send it to your PRO, your own PRO that you’re registered with, you can choose if you want to.

a default usually is ASK App, but if you don’t wanna be with ASK App, you can say that you want your music to be,  collected,  in the us,  via  BMI instead, or, or,  csac or, any other,  pros that exist over in the us.  Oh, and I, I,  I, as I said in the previous,  slide, I forgot to say, it’s good to be a member of A PRO also because there are networking opportunities and they usually have, have events where you can learn more about what they do.

So I highly recommend, getting registered with A-A-P-R-O sooner rather than later. So we’re now, we’re looking at, at this,  slide that says, it’s estimated that day more than 20% of publishing revenue is lost to c to due to incomplete and unmatched metadata.

 Now,  I think that the, that figure is actually higher than 20% because I’ve had people from major publishers saying that it’s probably more like 30% of the publishing revenue, that is being lost because, the pros and the, the publishers don’t have the correct data, or  that if you’ve co-written a song with other people, you might have registered your song differently,  to your co-writers.

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