James Delahunty
28 Feb 2010 16:19
SoundExchange, the establishment that has been tasked with collecting royalties for copyright holders and artists from music streaming services on the Internet, satellite radio and maybe traditional radio soon too, has told artists to label their music properly if they wish to receive their royalties.
SoundExchange Executive Director John Simson wrote in Billboard that the company actually has trouble finding out who owns the copyright to some songs it tracks and claims royalties for. He said the organization had about $40 million in royalties that it collected in 2008, which it could not distribute to artists and copyright owners because it couldn't find them.
Why not? Because the copyright owners didn't attach enough information to the song. Simson pleaded that at the very least, every song should include metadata identifying the artist, song name, album name, label or copyright owner.
SoundExchange also is holding $39 million for artists and copyright holders that simply have not registered with SoundExchange yet.