What To Do After Your Band Breaks Up

Being in a band is just like being in any other relationship: the beginning is exciting and full of possibility, but at some point, you might realize that you and your bandmates just aren’t on the same page anymore.

Whether it’s a build-up of small annoyances or big creative differences, it can be extremely difficult to come to the decision that it’s best for your band to break up. This is especially true if you’ve been playing together for a long time and have deep personal connections with your bandmates.

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How Do Bands Effectively Manage Their Royalties And Contracts?

When a band begins to achieve success, money will start coming in. Young members of a band and people who are new to earning an income through music may not know how to manage the income from royalties and contracts. These four tips will help you to effectively manage your income.

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General Licensing Infographic

Editor’s Note: This infographic is intended to visualize the world of General Licensing and how proposed changes could affect songwriters and music licensees. For more information, please check out the proposed SXSW 2017 Panel, “General Licensing: Where Are My Royalties?”  (Votes are also encouraged; voting ends 9/2/16.)

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Jason K Ventura’s Music Industry Predictions For 2016

The streaming business model will change across the board. The new models will have fairground for artists and labels alike.

Due to royalty rates and a rebellion of artists, streaming services will be forced to put limitations on music catalogs.

With prices at an all time low and stagnant music sales, touring will continue to be a cash cow for the music industry. Yet again, touring will be the bread winner this year.

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Ten Music Biz Predictions, Hopes & Dreams for 2016

1 Return of Real Songs

Millennials will come out of their collective fog and realize that what passes for pop music these days – well-produced, pleasant, beat-driven, formula, lyrically repetitive, singsongy, non-melodic music – are not really songs. Real songs – narrative stories with beginnings, middles and ends (as well as the clever bridges) - will stage a comeback, and real songwriters and performers will breathe a collective sigh of relief.

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Fair Play Fair Pay

2015 brought us many new technologies, but still our licensing system is clearly failing us. There is nothing protecting artists from digital, satellite, and AM/FM play. There is nothing set in place in the US to fairly compensate artists and musicians regarding fair play fair pay. The laws that pertain to royalty payments are unreliable and unfair. These laws need to be reevaluated. Terrestrial radio does not pay anything to artists and musicians, while cable and satellite were grandfathered in paying below the free market. Digital services, especially Pandora, have argued that music recorded prior to February 15, 1972 does not have to be legally paid. How is this fair to artists and musicians?

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SoundExchange Explained

SoundExchange is an independent nonprofit organization that is dedicated to collect and distribute royalties resulting from digital performance rights of sound recordings. When it was created in 2000, this organization was a division of the RIAA but in 2003 it became an independent organization, currently representing the interests of more than 110,000 artists and copyright owners. As reported by SoundExchange, they have already successfully paid nearly $3 billion since they first started doing business.

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How Understanding Publishing Can Help Independent Artists Make Money

I have read a ton of articles over the past few months about how important understanding publishing is to the independent artist, and it is. What confounds me is that even with all of this information, there is still confusion in the marketplace on how this works, especially when it comes to streaming services like YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud and others.

Lots of people in this business don’t understand it. Friends of mine at labels and management companies don’t understand it, independent artists don’t understand it and as more music consumption services come online, it is becoming more valuable to get the whole picture.

There is a great article here that gives a thorough overview of how publishing and other performance royalties work – so I don’t want to be repetitive, but I do want to take this opportunity to dive a little deeper into the way publishing works on YouTube – especially when it comes to cover songs.

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How To Make Money With Music Part 1: Gigging

Hello all, and welcome to Part 1 of what I hope will be a ongoing series on how to better make money in your music career. Whether you want to earn a full time income from your music or you simply want to make enough to cover recording or equipment costs, this series should go a way in helping you achieve that.

Today I’m going to look particularly at how you can make money from gigging. I often see musicians leaving money on the table from their gigging efforts, either through shyness, or simply because they didn’t know how best to monetize their performances. With that in mind, here are some of the main ways you should be making money from each gig.

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Pandora: A Change in Priorities

So you’re an independent recording artist, casting about everywhere you can for airplay and exposure. Pandora, the internet-radio service with the taste-smart music library, has just accepted one of your original recordings for rotation. Great, right? Pandora provides access to your music on one of the most talked-about music platforms out there. It’s a step in the right direction, a win.

Except it isn’t anymore.

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Would You Sue a Restaurant for $30,000 If They Didn't Pay You Royalties?

This makes me queasy:
Restaurant Owner Ordered to Pay BMI $30,450 For ‘Illegally Playing’ Four Unlicensed Songs

This is not about feeding musicians, it’s about feeding the “Royalty Collection Agencies”.

BMI began sending communication regarding the restaurant’s lack of proper licensing back in September of 2009, but it wasn’t until May of 2010 that BMI even bothered to visit Fosters to verify that the business was actually playing unlicensed music. (From page 32 of the PDF.)

So without verifying anything, BMI starts demanding payment from a restaurant for “Piracy”.

This is how the mafia demands “protection”.

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How to solve Royalty Collection Societies

This is a repost of something I published earlier today on my personal blog. Normally, I don’t like to repost stuff - but it kind of occurred to me that this is probably where I should have blogged it in the first place… :)

Performance Rights Organisations pay composers when their work is broadcast or otherwise performed in public. And rightly so. But making sure that everyone gets paid fairly is difficult to ensure - particularly when you consider how much data you’d need to track in order to be entirely accurate.

I think there’s another way.

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