RoyaltyShare Inc. moved quickly to capitalize on the landmark agreement that proposes royalty rates for interactive streams and downloads by announcing a new service designed to track and make payments for licenses covered in the agreement.
In that agreement, the Digital Media Association (DiMA), the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) and the Songwriters Guild of America (SGA) proposed to pay a 10.5% of revenue for mechanical royalty less any amount owed for composition performance.
RoyaltyShare is pitching the service — which is currently under development and will be available by the end of the year — to music publishers and online retailers. This service will compete against companies already competing for those services, like New York-based Rightsflow and Woodland Hills, Calif.-based Music Reports Inc.
“Setting the rates was the first critical step,” RoyaltyShare chairman/CEO Bob Kohn said in a statement. “The second step is equally important – delivering the technology services scalable enough to handle the complexity and volume of transactions generated by streaming and limited download services. Music publishers and retailers now face a common problem and it must be solved quickly in order to avoid a massive bottleneck of payments owed to songwriters.”
The RoyaltyShare platform allows digital music services to track all of their licenses, including ownership splits, and allocate revenue from streams and limited downloads to agencies, publishing administrators and thousands of independent publishers. The service facilitates the ingestion of song data from publishers and provides a solution for matching songs to transactions.
For music publishers, RoyaltyShare’s data interfaces with all the major digital music services, whether it uses the company’s platform or not, and allows for automated loading and matching transactions and further provides analytics for monitoring performance of songs across different services, according to a company press release on the service.
“For these new statutory mechanical licenses to work in practice, it is essential for a neutral service provider to work with both the publishers and the retailers,” Kohn said.
