Music Business

All Sound & Fury: The confused thesis of U.S. Copyright Office’s unmatched music report [CHRIS CASTLE]

Although the Copyright Office’s recent unmatched music report makes an effort to match transitory royalty payments and settle up with songwriters, it fails to prioritize the creation of a gold standard musical works database.

Guest post by Chris Castle of Music Technology Solutions

One of the first world problems with the Copyright Office unmatched report (and frankly the legislative history) is that the Office seems to confound matching transitory royalty payments with building a permanent asset. There is an inherent tension in utilizing a cost-benefit analysis to decide which songs are “worth” identifying and paying compared to which songs are “worth” identifying to build the Congressionally-mandated core asset of the Mechanical Licensing Collective–the public’s musical works database.

These are two entirely different projects. The unmatched report misses the opportunity to properly distinguish them and emphasize the priority that must be given to building the gold standard musical works database–for which the services pay and in consideration for which the services received a Congressionally mandated retroactive safe harbor for the legion of past infringements. It now becomes apparent that the services were not really serious about doing the hard work and wanted to do just enough to be able to get their safe harbor.

But what about the $424 million in black box, you say? Didn’t they pay beaucoup bucks to settle up with songwriters? Yes, it’s true–the services paid songwriters with what services said was the amount of the songwriters own money that the services owed them due to extraordinarily sloppy licensing practices. Hopefully when the accounting data is made public, we will have a better idea of whether this $424 million makes sense as the semi-accurate number. If, however, it turns out that the vast bulk of the retroactive payment of $424 million accrued over the last few years, that is, since the passing of the MMA Title I safe harbor to benefit those who need it least, it will become apparent that the “historic” retroactive payment was neither historic nor particularly retroactive. Watch the Eight Mile Style case in Tennessee for some answers on this where both Spotify and the Harry Fox Agency are being sued by Eminem’s publishers.

Yet this confusion over the difference between complying with the Congressional mandate to build an authoritative musical works database and some line in the legislative history that the lobbyists inserted about “play your part” is another reason why using a cost benefit analysis for identifying long tail royalty payments makes no sense.

The MLC is charged by Congress with creating the public musical works database–an asset. The MLC is also charged with accounting for royalties–a payment. The report says “The MLC should take reasonable steps to ensure that its data is of the highest possible quality, meaning, among other things, that it is as complete, accurate, up-to-date, and de-conflicted as possible, and is obtained from authoritative sources.” But not if the cost of quality data exceeds the royalties payable in a particular month?

Payments change, assets do not. The MLC are either building a “highest possible quality asset” or they are doing the usual 80/20 “industry standard” slop that is already becoming the MLC’s go-to excuse for failure. Because rest assured–it will always be someone else’s fault. Who do you think caused that “industry standard” to exist? One of the MLC’s principal vendors, mebbbie?

The services like the Title I safe harbor just fine, but obviously no one is interested in actually building an asset of the “highest quality” which is a different enterprise than royalty accounting.

Which is it going to be? I think we all know the answer. If we let it, it will be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

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