El tema de la metadata pareciera ser uno de los aspectos más aburridos de la música, pero como nos damos cuenta, es uno de los más importantes, más complejos y más fragmentados, ocasionando que muchos músicos artistas no puedan recibir pagos por su trabajo. Cuando un artista no está bien identificado en la metadata de un tema, cada segundo que pasa mientras este problema no se soluciona, está perdiendo dinero.

Introducir la información correcta de una canción suena como una tarea bastante fácil de hacer, pero los problemas con la metadata han plagado a la industria de la música por décadas. No existe un estándar de cómo esta información debería ser recopilada o mostrada, no existe la necesidad de verificar la metadata de una canción antes de su lanzamiento, y tampoco existe un lugar, físico o virtual, para almacenarla. En su lugar, fracciones de datos se mantienen en cientos de sitios diferentes en todo el mundo.

Como resultado, el problema es mucho más grande que un nombre mal deletreado cuando vemos los créditos de una canción en Spotify. Una metadata que es inexistente, mal hecha o inconsistente es una crisis que ha dejado millones de dólares sin dueño, que nunca han llegado a las manos de quienes se han ganado ese dinero. Y mientras la cantidad de música que es creada y consumida continúa creciendo a un ritmo acelerado, este problema solamente se hará más complejo.

Un problema de consolidación

La base de datos de una discográfica probablemente es muy diferente a la de Spotify, la cual probablemente sea diferente a las base de datos de la sociedades de gestión, como ASCAP o BMI, las cuales se encargan de pagar las royalties a los músicos por sus presentaciones en público. «Parte del problema es que los campos que cada quien ha escogido para introducir la información en sus programas informáticos son todos diferentes«, indica el abogado Jeff Becker. «Entonces, se envía información de un track que contiene el campo «Ingeniero de Pro Tools» pero la base de datos que recibe la información no contiene ese campo, entonces se opta por ignorarlo y ese crédito se pierde en el camino«.

Cada base de datos de cada servicio tiene su propio conjunto de reglas. Si Ariana Grande, Nicki Minaj y Jessie J colaboran en un nuevo track y éste es distribuido a Apple Music con todos los nombres en el mismo campo para «Artista», esto causaría lo que se conoce como un «error compuesto artista». Si se introduce el nombre del artista como «apellido, nombre» también ocasionaría un error. Existen formas de lograr que la metadata se incluya dentro del archivo para que toda la información «viaje» junta, pero por lo general los agregadores solicitan que sea eliminada porque puede causar problemas con la subida.

El segundo gran problema es que la información que se introduce con frecuencia es incorrecta. Una canción puede pasar por varios compositores, productores e ingenieros antes de que llegue a manos de un artista, y cada uno de los que contribuye puede fastidiarlo todo. Cuanto mayor sea la cadena de custodia de los datos, mayor es el riesgo de que alguna parte será incorrecta. Un nombre puede introducirse incorrectamente, o un ingeniero que trabajó brevemente en un track puede quedarse fuera, o una fusión entre dos bases de datos puede salir mal y ocasionar errores técnicos que eliminen la información.

Incluso en un sola canción, la metadata puede llegar a ser bastante complicada. Por ejemplo el tema «Firework» de Katy Perry: Capitol Records es la discográfica titular de los derechos por la grabación, sin embargo la canción tiene 5 compositores diferentes que pertenecen cada uno a una editorial distinta, cada uno de los cuales es titular de un porcentaje de los derechos de la composición, y toda esta información debería estar incluida en la metadata para que cada uno pueda ser identificado y recibir su dinero.

El hecho de que una sola composición tenga tantos autores no es inusual hoy en día. En 2016 el promedio de compositores por canción era de 4, que a su vez pertenecían a 6 editoriales. Esto crea un gran potencial para que la metadata sea introducida de forma incorrecta. Y si uno de los créditos está incompleto, mal deletreado, o no concuerda con los campos de la base de datos de un servicio de streaming, esto puede afectar los pagos de todos los involucrados. Todos estos pequeños errores se acumulan y se estima que debido a ellos, existe un bote de aproximadamente $250 millones que los servicios de streaming tienen retenidos sin poder pagarlos a los compositores correspondientes.

_{Fuente: The Verge}

The post La importancia de la Metadata en la industria musical (Parte I) first appeared on IndustriaMusical.com.

Jeff Price is the founder and former CEO of TuneCore and currently the founder of Audiam, a company whose business is to collect the royalties owed by digital platforms to songwriters and publishers in the US and Canada. In an exclusive interview for IndustriaMusical.es, Jeff tells us about how Spotify and other streaming services generate millions of dollars in mechanical royalties that are never paid to these creators at all.

IM: You approached IndustriaMusical.es to talk about how Spotify and other streaming platforms are not paying the songwriters in the Spanish speaking market, is that correct?

Yes, that is correct. In fact, this is happening in all markets, however the market for hispanic music appears to be even more exploited than other genres. What I mean is, latin and hispanic music is incredibly popular, they get a lot of streams because it’s great music and also because of the increasingly large hispanic population in the US, and so far everything we have found tells us that this particular genre is not properly licensed, but generates a lot more revenue than other genres such as hip-hop, rock, jazz, etc. which means that the songwriters and publishers are not being paid.

IM: What data do you have to claim all this?

To understand the way in which we have been able to discover all this, we have to understand first the way in which the law operates in the US, which is different than the rest of the world. Let’s use the example of the song «I will always love you», which was recorded and popularized by Whitney Houston but it was written by Dolly Parton. So, for every song recorded there are two copyrights, one for the recording of the song, which in this case belongs to Sony, and another for the composition of the song (lyrics and melody) which belongs to Dolly Parton. When this particular song is downloaded from iTunes, the licence for the composition, meaning the money that belongs to Dolly Parton has to be paid by the record label and not by iTunes, and this is what’s known as a passthrough licence.

When the law changed in 2005, the passthrough licence was eliminated for interactive streaming services, such as Spotify, which meant that the responsibility to pay the songwriter started falling upon the shoulders of the platforms that allowed the reproduction of the works in their service.

So, if someone writes a song in Spain, and that song is being streamed on Spotify in the US, Spotify should have requested a licence from the songwriter themselves in order to be able to even make the song available in their service, but I can bet that 99% of the songwriters in Spain, or any other country, have not been contacted by Spotify. This means that your music has been stolen, used without authorization in order to generate value for Spotify.

IM: How is a licence obtained?

There are two ways to do this. The first one is to contact the songwriter directly, request a licence from them and negotiate between the parts until they sign a licence contract. The second one is through a compulsory licence, and this only happens in the US. A compulsory licence means that a songwriter is obligated to issue a licence to whomever wants to use their songs, as long as he or she is notified. The service has to notify the songrwriter and when this happens, the songwriter will immediately know that their work is available in the platform and the platorm will know who wrote all the songs and will be able to pay them each month.

So, if Spotify doesn’t obtain a licence by either one of these two methods, they’re not allowed to host the music in their service. And this is exactly what is happening, the music is being streamed without the authorization of the songwriters and is being used to generate revenues and value for a company that has raised more that $1 billion in capital taking avantage of the creators in order to launch an IPO.

You would think that a company like Spotify would establish a mechanism to identify the songwriters of the songs on their service, but it was never created. There is a system in place to pay the record labels, but not the songwriters. In order to do this they hired a third party, the Harry Fox Agency, which said to them that they could not do this work and even included a clause in their contract in which Spotify agrees not to sue them if they cannot do the work.

IM: How did you realize that Spotify had not obtained the licences?

What I did for my work with Audiam was to collect all the metadata from all the recorded music available through digital services by using a series of techniques and public APIs. I extracted all this information from platforms like Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, etc. I took all of this metadata and added it to my own database in my computer, and now I have a list of more than 70 million songs which includes who the performer is, the song duration, the name of the album, date of release and the IRSC codes of each one.

When a songwriter becomes a memeber of Audiam, what I do is to look in my database for all of the data of the recordings that exists of the music of that songwriter. The first time we did this was with Metallica and we realized that Spotify had not been paying the mechanical royalties for more than three years, a period of time in which their songs had been streaming more than 400 million times, not counting the thousands of covers that are also hosted by the platform, and that should generate royalties for Metallica as songwriters.

When we asked Spotify about this they told us it had been a computer error and that it would be solved immediately. However, when we did the same for the Red Hot Chili Peppers we found out that 85% of the recordings of their songs were not paying the mechanical royalties. This happened with all of our artists in any genre.

In October 2015 one of our clients, the music company Victory in Chicago found out that 4000 of their compositions had been streamed 53 million times and had not paid any mechanical royalties. In that particular case Spotify had the music taken down and the incident brought some attention from the media. It was at that point that I finally realized that Spotify had never requested a licence from the songwriters for any of the music available on their platform. When we asked for evidence of the licences they had, they couldn’t give us anything, because there wasn’t anything.

The law in the US establishes that when there is a willful copyright infringement there is a penalty of $150.000 per infraction. When you look at Spotify’s catalog which has more than 40 million songs you get an idea of the enormous financial liability they are faced with. Let’s assume that some of those songs are covers, so that means we are talking around 25 million unlicensed compositions. Multiply that by the amount of the penalty.

The idea that a digital platform could do this is something that never occurred to me. When the Victory case reached the media, people started to understand what was happening and two class action lawsuits were introduced against Spotify.

Right now at Audiam we are working with catalogs of hispanic music and what we have found is that, if for the rest of songs in the platform 85% don’t have a licence, in the case of the hispanic music catalog it’s a 100%. The case of YouTube is incredibly worse.

There is a lot of misinformation and the songwriters are being hurt because they don’t know how the rules of the game work. The worst part is that these digital platforms are some of the most powerful companies in the planet: Spotify, Amazon, Google. All of them use music to increase market share, to sell iPhones, to sell hardware and software, but the creators of this music are not being paid at all.

Now, there is something that the songwriters need to understand, especially hispanic songwriters: in order to be eligible to receive mechanical royalties payments and be able to sue for copyright infringement, their works have to be registered with the US Copyright Office. If the songwriter does not register their songs, these can be use without authorization, but the only recourse they will have is to request the songs are taken down from the service.

The bottom line here is that a technology company like Spotify has raised more than $1 billion dollars on the backs of music creators, they’ve been valued at $8.5 billion by grabbing all this music to create that value, they didn’t bother in obtaining a licence, didn’t bother paying the royalties, when they do pay the amount is tiny, their accounts are a mess, they didn’t bother creating an infrastructure for this.

What I’ve done with my company is getting these platforms to pay what they owe to my clients and right now I’m collecting money that was generated in 2007. Some clients have chosen to take legal action.

IM: Have record labels overlooked this situation?

In the case of mechanical royalties the record labels have nothing to do with it. The burden is on the platforms: Spotify, Google, Amazon. The record labels are at no fault here.

What makes this situation even more twisted is that when Spotify receives a notification from a songwriter telling them that they are breaking the law because they have no licence, what should happen is that the music sould be taken down, but at the same time nobody wants their music taken down, what they want is to get paid. So, if you notify, you get removed from an important distribution channel for your music and if you don’t, you don’t get paid.

IM: So they lose either way.

They are already losing. What I say is you’re not getting paid anyway so there’s no difference. The reality is that if all the publishers and songwriters took a stand, said «no more» and took their music off Spotify, it will cease to exist. That’s why it’s so important to spread this information and let people know what’s happening because without the songwriters, without the publishers, without labels, there is no Spotify.

IM: For a songwriter, having their works on Spotify is beneficial even if they’re not getting paid.

I understand the logic behind that, but I would say to the songwriters, what’s going to happen in 3 or 4 years if we don’t do anything right now? There won’t be a music business, you’ll never get paid for anything, all that exposure will be for nothing. The music business consists in finding opportunities to make money from your music, if that is what you want, you have to take a stand now. In 3 or 4 years Spotify will have their IPO with a value of $20 billion. I think we have to think more strategically and say: I like your service, I want to be in it, but could you please obtain a licence and pay me? And if enough songwriters and publishers did this, it will definitely have an impact.

IM: Anything else to add?

I just want to let people know that regardless of the country you’re in, the same rules apply if your music is being heard in the US, and having this information is crucial because we live in a global industry. The US market is the biggest most important market for music and we have a huge hispanic audience that listens to and buys music. The amount of money being generated and not paid to songwriters is close to $400 million which is simply astounding.

_{*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity purposes.}

The post Jeff Price: «Songwriters are being ripped off by streaming services» first appeared on IndustriaMusical.com.

El lanzamiento traslada su popular portal online hacia un formato móvil, disponible en iOS con una versión para Android disponible en el futuro cercano.

El CEO y fundador de Kobalt, Willard Ahdritz ha denominado a la app «un paso gigante hacia la transparencia y disponibilidad on-demand de sus propios datos, algo que muchas otras industrias ya tienen en funcionamiento«.

La App también le permite a los clientes de Kobalt comparar datos financieros de los trimestres anteriores y enterarse de cuando recibirán sus pagos. Un elemento de sincronización permite a los usuarios monitorizar sus trabajos desde el momento en que se hace el pitch al cliente final hasta el momento del pago.

Los usuarios tendrán acceso a reportes diarios de todos los ingresos y actividades relacionadas con cada una de sus fuentes de ingresos, incluyendo Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Pandora y más.

«Esta conexión entre el trabajo de un creador y sus ingresos, es la primera en su clase«, indicó Ahdritz. «Es un cambio fundamental en la relación entre los titulares de derechos y sus propios datos. Solo imaginemos cómo esto puede influir en sus decisiones, formar sus perspectivas acerca de la industria y el streaming, otorgándoles poder al darles acceso a los hechos. Yo creo que esto tendrá un impacto enorme en el futuro de la industria- salir de la oscuridad, acceso total, en tiempo real, todo en una sola App«.

Gary Go, cliente de Kobalt, productor y compositor para artistas como Rihanna y Skrillex dijo: «Como compositor y editor independiente, esta app es una herramienta soñada«. La App incluye noticias de la industria, para mantener a los creadores informados acerca del día a día.

Una de las particularidades de la App de las cuales Kobalt se encuentra más orgulloso, es su capacidad para mostrar a los creadores todos los ingresos que están recibiendo de YouTube, sea de vídeos oficiales, covers or sensaciones virales.

La App de Kobalt es gratuita para los clientes editoriales de la compañía y se puede descargar desde ya en cualquier país donde está disponible la Apple App Store.

The post Kobalt introduce App para compositores first appeared on IndustriaMusical.com.

Respaldado por BMI y ASCAP, esta nueva legislación permitiría a un juez  considerar todas las evidencias pertinentes, como por ejemplo los royalties pagados a la música grabada, al determinar la compensación de un autor, una habilidad que está actualmente prohibida por la ley. La desigualdad causada por esta restricción actual ha dado lugar a que autores y compositores reciban 12 veces menos que lo que reciben los sellos discográficos y los artistas por una reproducción o un streaming, de la misma canción.

Esta legislación también supondría una segunda actualización de la actual Ley de Propiedad Intelectual de EEUU, en la que se adoptaría una tarifa estándar justa para las licencias de reproducción mecánica, la cual fue fijada en 2 centavos de dólar en 1909 y  a la fecha solo ha aumentado nominalmente a 9,1 centavos de dólar. Estas enmiendas ayudarían a establecer un valor justo de mercado para el uso de las composiciones musicales y asegurará  que escribir canciones siga siendo una profesión viable, que en última instancia beneficiará tanto a los titulares de derechos como a los usuarios.

El Presidente de la ASCAP, Paul Williams indicó que «El Songwriter Equity Act es un importante primer paso hacia un sistema de licencias más eficaz y eficiente que beneficie a todos – consumidores, titulares de licencias de música, y también a autores y compositores, que son la base de una industria musical que cambia rápidamente. Pero mientras que la tecnología ha creado oportunidades increíbles para que la música llegue a nuevos públicos, también ha creado un auténtico desafío para los compositores y otros creadores a la hora de la concesión de licencias de nuestro trabajo, ya que las reglas que rigen la forma en que hacemos negocios no han evolucionado… con la actualización de las disposiciones obsoletas actuales, el Congreso tiene la oportunidad de modernizar el sistema de licencias de música para que los compositores y autores pueden prosperar en la misma medida de las empresas que utilizan nuestra música».

Fuente: Billboard

The post Autores introducen Proyecto de Ley de Equidad en EEUU first appeared on IndustriaMusical.com.