Understanding What Happens to Your Musical Work Data

I created a song. What happens next so I can get paid for its use?

For a creator to get paid, the appropriate (musical) work data must enter the copyright administration ecosystem. This includes all the players responsible for tracking the use of the work and managing its related data to ensure that royalty payments ultimately make their way to the correct rightsholders (e.g., the creator and the creator’s publisher if one is involved).

The data within that ecosystem is used by a long list of organizations including music users (e.g., streaming services, record labels, radio/television stations, etc.) who exploit the work and the players who license and administer them with the objective of collecting royalties on behalf of the creator (e.g., collective management organizations (CMOs), publishing companies, copyright administrators, etc.). Each organization requires work data as it relates to their service offering. They frequently attempt to enhance the work data to deliver their services. Unfortunately, these players do not always work cohesively, resulting in problematic data issues that stand to negatively impact the royalties that should be paid to the creator.

In very simple steps, let’s follow what often happens after a work is created. A creator typically enters into representation agreements with publishers who promote their work. Publishers then enter into agreements with labels to have the work recorded. The labels promote and license the recordings for use through multiple media streams. Monitoring services track usage and report back to CMOs for royalty payments. All these organizations add data to the original work to allow them to better conduct their respective business (e.g., publishers will add ISWCs and their share interests, record labels will add ISRCs, etc.). What started with a creator writing a work now involves multiple organizations needing to add complementary data to the original work and to better track their use over time.

The creator’s original work that started with basic information about the song may now have interests from co-creators and publishers in multiple territories handling multiple rights, labels releasing multiple recordings on multiple media streams, which are tracked by multiple monitoring services who report to multiple organizations on when, where and how the work has been used/played. What doesn’t change through this entire process is who created the work in the first place, but the ways in which that work will be exploited will continue to evolve.

Few copyright administration systems are sophisticated enough to record all the interactions and updates that occur to that original work, which ultimately causes data conflicts and delays in royalty payments. The more touch points and layers or actors there are, the more likely data problems will occur.

In QRS’s experience, our 360-degree view of the work and its related data, including usage information, provides us with unique insight to the data issues resulting from these many players and processes.

Whether you are a creator, CMO, publisher, or record label, the need to effectively record and track the exploitation of musical works is paramount to ensure that accurate royalty payments are made. QRS can help you understand and address what is happening with your data and how it can be addressed to maximize your income. Contact us at info@qwantumrights.com .