Home » Jazz News » Music Industry

60

Take Your Royalty Checks SoundExchange Begs

Source:

Sign in to view read count
Grammy-winning R&B singer Sam Moore and his manager and wife, Joyce, say a lot of legacy artists haven t heard of SoundExchange. “They think the money isn't real," Joyce Moore says.

When John Boydston got an e-mail from SoundExchange saying he had several thousand dollars in unclaimed royalties, he did what most sensible people would do. He ignored it.

To the rock musician from Atlanta, “money for nothing" meant a song by Dire Straits, not a stranger contacting him out of the blue promising to cut him big checks.

But then he got the message again six months later. Curious, he called SoundExchange.

“Sure enough, they had a sizable amount of money for me," said Boydston, 51, whose band Daddy a Go Go includes his two teenage sons. “It was several thousand dollars. That's not a ton of money. But for a guy who makes CDs in his basement, it was enough to finance my next album."

Boydston's money came from royalties that SoundExchange has squirreled away on his behalf since 2001, when Congress created the nonprofit to collect royalties from digital music streams on Internet, satellite radio and cable television. So far, the group has distributed about $360 million to more than 45,000 artists and copyright holders.

But at any given time, about 25% of the money SoundExchange gets from online music services such as Pandora, XM Radio and Last.fm can't be distributed because the artists can't be tracked down. Currently, that amounts to about $50 million. And with the rising popularity of Internet radio, the cash pile has been growing, said John Simson, SoundExchange's executive director.

Continue Reading...

Comments

Tags

News

Popular

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.