And The Writer Is...with Ross Golan - Ep. 127: Special Episode w/ Kris Ahrend and Michelle Lewis

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Today we are joined by two highly-influential music creators’ rights advocates. Kris Ahrend began his career in the music industry working in the Law Department at Sony Music, where he provided legal services to all of Sony’s US divisions, including its publishing company. He subsequently worked in the business and legal affairs department at Sony BMG Music Entertainment before accepting a senior executive role at Rhino Entertainment. Kris Ahrend now serves as Chief Executive Officer for The MLC, where he leads the organization’s mission to ensure songwriters, composers, lyricists, and music publishers receive their mechanical royalties from streaming and download services in the U.S. accurately and on time. Most recently, Ahrend led the development and launch of Warner Music Group’s Center of Excellence for Shared Services in Nashville, where he oversaw the operations of fifteen different functional teams providing a variety of administrative, financial, and legal services to Warner Music’s U.S.- based publishing teams, record labels, and corporate divisions. Michelle Lewis is an award-winning songwriter, composer, singer and music creators’ rights advocate. From her early career as a recording artist signed to Irving Azoff’s Giant Records, to her first radio hit, Cher’s “A Different Kind of Love Song” in 2002, to the 2014 worldwide #1 single “Wings” by the British girl group Little Mix, Ms. Lewis brings authenticity, musicality, and heart to a diverse range of pop music. In 2015, Michelle Lewis co-founded the non-profit advocacy organization, Songwriters Of North America (SONA) in response to the ever-increasing complexities and inequities in digital royalties paid to songwriters and composers. Through her roles as SONA’s Executive Director, on the ASCAP Board of Directors, as an LA Chapter board member of the Recording Academy and on the Executive Committee of the Music Peer Group for the Television Academy, Michelle is solidly situated on the leading edge of issues facing songwriters: the ongoing fight to make streaming royalty rates more fair to creators, education and empowerment of creators through metadata, the implementation and utilization of the new Mechanical Licensing Collective, and fighting for songwriters to get healthcare and workplace safety standards in place.And The Executive are… Kris Ahrend and Michelle Lewis! Artwork: Michael Richey White Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey guys, welcome to Ann the writer is. I'm your host, Ross Golan. I've written with hundreds of artists and writers over the years, and my favorite part of each session is the first hour when we catch up about life, the industry, politics, composition, whatever. So this is a journey of learning why people write songs, how people write songs, and most importantly, who the people are who write the songs.

I'm producing this with the Great Joe London, big deal music publishing, and mega house music management. If you want to listen to the songs we discuss in this podcast, follow us on our socials, find out about special live events, or buy that merch, aka that hat I always wear, go to our website www.com. And The Writer is.com. Welcome to The And The Writer is MLC Special.

I am your host, Ross Golan. Today's songwriter advocates are here to explain the most substantial part of the Music Modernization Act. It is revolutionary. And in the spirit of songwriters being entrepreneurs, it is essential for our community. Learn this information and teach your writers, your publishers, your managers. So without further ado, let's start this combo. And the writer advocates are the chief executive officer for the mechanical licensing collective,

Chris Aaron and the co-founder of one of our favorite nonprofit advocacy organizations, Songwriters of North America, Sona, Michelle Lewis. Hey. Hi. So this is fun because, you know, I obviously know both of you and, you know, Michelle is one of my main counterparts in the world of advocacy. and so it's fun to have her on this. But, you know, most people don't understand what we were fighting for.

We just knew that the Music Modernization Act was this thing that would help songwriters out. Most people didn't understand what the different parts were. And without going into the other parts of the Music Modernization Act that were important, this is probably the most substantial part that affects most songwriters for now, maybe some other stuff with PRO stuff later. But this is going to be, this can revolutionize how we compute data in the songwriting community.

And as, you know, as Chris said to me at one point earlier this week, you know, if you get the data right, you know, the money will come. There was probably a better way of him saying it than that. But I want to ask a few questions so we can get through this in a tight way. And I'm going to start with Michelle because Michelle and I were partners on fighting for the MMA. My question to Michelle is, why did we fight for the MMA? What is this MLC thing? What is a mechanical licensing collective?

Why do we care? We spent, how many times do we talk, were we talking at like 8 o'clock in the morning, Ross or like over weekends, like just figuring without wondering who was going to block it? Why they didn't want us to pass this so badly? Because it ultimately modernizes, the modernization part is really just moving a mechanic. from like an actual CD or album or thing that you buy in a store over to a stream, I mean, which is how people consume music now. At literally modernized the way people consume music, it kind of like made it jive with how things

are done now, you know. Chris, what is a mechanical? A mechanical license is the license that someone needs. want to copy and then distribute a song. And so that right dates back to the early 1900s when you would make a piano roll that represented a song and you'd put it into a player piano and you'd spin it and it would mechanically reproduce the song on that player piano. And ever since then, that concept has continued to be used and applied to all the different formats that came along. Vinyl, eight-track, cassette, CD, downloads, streams. So if I'm an artist and I release a song,

what is the way that, what are the ways that I get paid? Well, if you're an artist, the first question to ask, and it's a really difficult one sometimes because you wouldn't think this way. the question is, did I write the song? Did I perform the song? Did I do both? Because many artists write their own songs and then they perform their own songs. Michelle is a great example. You are an example. So if you have performed and written and you have rights to the recording, you can be paid both for the uses of your recording, the recording of your performance, and of course the use of the song that you are performing. And so for us, when we talk with songwriters or creators, The first distinction we want to make we like to make is to ask that question. When you think of

yourself and what you do, are you just a songwriter in any given instance, or are you just a performer performing for recordings, or did you do both? Because if you did both, then there are two sets of rights that can lead to multiple revenue streams. If you only wrote the song, then there is one set of rights, but even within that, there are lots of revenue streams. So we can start with that, songwriter, performer, and then we can break it down from there. Okay, so I'm a singer songwriter. I write 100% of my songs. That's easy to figure out, the easier to figure out.

But in a practical sense, almost everyone who listens to this podcast co-writes. So those splits, when you have two people and it's clean, it's 50, 50, 3 people, 33. percent for people 25 20 16.6 20.28 so on and so forth and that number gets diluted depending how many people if it's equal splits. Michelle why is it so hard for people to register splits? Because it's so uncomfortable in the room to like have that conversation that you don't walk you don't go into your first date going like all right so what's what's going to happen. Are we going to like, hook up? We're going to get married?

Like, you don't have that conversation, like, right at the outset of meeting somebody. So when you first walk into a room, it's a pretty amateur hour to kind of be like, what's our split situation? So it tends to happen afterwards, and it's a funky conversation to have. Usually sometimes managers will have it for you, sometimes publishers will have it for you. But it's really hard to get people to sort of take it. It's not fun. It's not taxi. So we avoid it. It's about money ultimately, right? And no one likes to talk about money unless they're receiving it because money conversations are awkward.

How much did you spend on that? Oh, I don't want to talk about that. How much do you make? I don't want to talk about that. So I think it's awkward for all the reasons that talking about money is awkward for probably every human being on the planet. You don't know my extended family. But let's say this. So everyone's like, Okay, this is ridiculous. How is this, how are the, you know, it's always weird when people think that what they are creating in their room right now musically actually has an effect at the end. They just assume that they'll be getting paid. But they don't really understand all the repercussions that come from this one conversation of what are our splits creates this avalanche of issues because each person is, now has their own admin company collecting their portion of each song. So your publisher, which is most likely also your admin company, is trying to track down your, let's say you're one of six writers,

your 16.6% of every song that you're one sixth of a writer, they're having to go and collect this. So what happens if what happens if five of the people register copyright the song and one sixth is missing? Or what happens when one person's like, well, I wrote 33% of this and the math all of a sudden doesn't add up? Chris, what happens to a song that doesn't have the correct splits?

Well, it depends on whether the total adds up to more or less than 100. percent. And this is another part of what makes this tricky, and that is that it immediately introduces the subject of math. And most people who don't do math for a living don't like to do math. And that's just as true for songwriters, probably as it is for lawyers as an example, and lots of other people. So if all those shares out up to less than a hundred, then there's a good chance that everybody will get paid what they thought. But let's say there were three writers and they all thought they had a 50% share. So three times 50 is 150%. That's probably going to gum up the works and none of those folks will get paid or maybe the first two people that registered

their works will get paid because 50 plus 50 is 100. And the third person to show up, they won't get paid because whoever it is that they're giving that information to, we'll say, wait a minute, we've already got 100%. We don't need anymore. And now that third person is sort of fighting to get in the conversation. So anytime the shares out up to more than 100%, there's a potential problem. Okay, so now we got a problem. But it can't be that big.

I mean, most of the songs I have splits with, like, I don't know. I mean, I think I get paid on most of it, right? I mean, what happens? But do you check? Do you check afterwards? I guess I don't. what if there is some way to check Michelle what happens when

a song comes out the assumption is when you get your statement from your publisher or you know if you're self-publish maybe you get it through tune course you know what your publishing percentages or whatever it is how do I check

if the splisher right that's a great question well I mean I tend to use my PRO portal to look at split some things that's feel like that's my sort of go-to, but now with the MLC, you can, one of the things that

the MMA that we fought for, so hire us, one of the things that mandates in the statute is a database, a public database. And so we can go into this database and see what we're getting paid on, what we're not getting paid on. If something looks funky, we can report that to our publisher.

And then if we don't have a publisher, we can actually kind of correct it ourselves. So that's a huge change from before. I mean, you know, we had our PROs to sort of deal with this stuff, but that's like almost a step removed from where we are now. A lot of acronyms. There's a PRO is a performance rights organization that's most likely BMI or ASCAP or CSAT or GMR.

and then there's a bunch of smaller ones that exist. But what they do is they collect on performances, and there was an organization called Harry Fox. They used to collect on mechanicals. They would collect, if you had a CD or an MP3, and it was 9.1 cents per song was the mechanical rate. It was the statutory rate, terrible phrase, for that mechanical use. Why couldn't, why did we need the MLC that Harry Fox was collecting streaming?

Wasn't it, Chris? Why would we, what was wrong with Harry Fox taking their 13% and then not doing their job well? Wait, what did I say? Sorry, no, Chris, your words, mine. What? So the answer is there were companies like HFA. There were others that essentially in that case worked for the digital services and helped them clear each share of each work that was on a service.

And then there were some services that did it themselves. But the challenge was, one, it's hard to do. And two, up until the MMMA, was passed, the way that the services or the companies they hired had to do that was they had to go out and they had to find each individual writer and clear each share of each work individually, meaning on the licensing part of the process. They had to license everything, share by share, work by work. And if we go back to what we talked about at the top of the hour, when you're releasing player piano rolls, that's not a big deal because player piano roles are pretty heavy. They're hard to

make, there aren't many of them. And it was even okay when you were releasing vinyl records, cassettes, eight tracks, CDs, the volume started to pick up, but, you know, how many CDs could a record store fit in a record store? But suddenly the advent of digital downloads arrives, and now you've got the ability to have tens of millions of songs, sound recordings, available in your store, right? It's digital. There's no limit. Some of the largest digital services now have more than 70 million sound recordings available on their services. So the task involved clearing 70 million songs and the shares of each of those songs, one work at a time, one share at a time, one writer at a time. And each digital service had to figure out a way to do that.

So if it was through Harry Fox, they had to contact each one of those people and do that one at a time. That proved to be really unwieldy. It was basically not scalable. And we know that. You know that because one of the things that motivated great advocates like you and Michelle to fight for the changes the MMA brought. was the fact that you knew that there was money sitting with the digital services that they could not pay or did not pay because they could not find the right person to pay. Oh, so that means that they were collecting this money and then if they couldn't find it, what happened to that money? They held it.

Uh-huh. So the MMA passes. We now have this MLC. Well, it's got to cost us a fortune to run an organization that goes through 70 million. songs and songwriters who you know the publishing industry makes i want to say it's what is it 3.5 billion a year or it's not it's not huge but it's not small i mean i imagine like the mechanical licensing collective must cost tens of millions of dollars to run every year uh michel who pays for that the digital services pay for it what why would spot i know

and Apple and Title and Pandora, why would these people pay for our database? Because it's better than us suing them. Ah, but can I still sue them? Nope. Okay. If they go through the, if they use the MLC for licensing,

they are indemnified. They are, they get indemnity. Okay. And that was the big kind of one of the big changes. The MMA created a blanket license. So now, instead of having to clear each work and each share on a work by work basis, the services can secure a blanket license by sending the MLC a notice. Those notices get posted and they are posted on our website right now. So if you go to the MLC's website, you can find a list of all of the services that have sent us notices that have said, we're going to operate under this blanket license. And now, all of those works, any work in the world, any song in the world is licensed. They then have to send the MLC, all the royalties that are due on any song that's used. Doesn't matter. They no longer have to figure out who to find. They just have to send us all the money, period, and stop. And they have to send us a whole lot of data, much more data than they had to provide before.

And the MLC then is responsible for taking all that money and all that data and then connecting it with the right songwriters, the right publishers, the right people, who have the right to receive those mechanicals. So you're using the word licensing. I mean, I only know licensing is, you know, television and film, and you hear this word licensing and, you know, mechanical. I only know that word is being CDs and, you know, mechanically reproduced masters.

So all this is really confusing. When you're talking about licensing, are they paying songwriters? What does licensing mean when you're talking about, everyone just being allowed to play these songs. Right. So again, that mechanical license, that mechanical right, that exists for all of the things you just mentioned. And if you're using a song on a TV show, there's actually a sync right that I know you and your listeners will know about because sync is yet another revenue stream. But the point is the services that put your songs up when they put those sound recordings out there, they have to have the rights, both from the sound recording owner and the song.

owner, the musical work owner, to do that. And now they can get a blanket license that gives them that right for every song that exists, provided they adhere to all the requirements under the law and they give the MLC the money and the data that is due under that blanket license. So that's the money that we will now pay to songwriters. And that's the right that songwriters provide under the law to the services. So songwriters give the rights to the services via the blanket license. That's a mandatory thing. It's established by law. And that's something that you as creators have given. But in exchange for that, you now have an organization, a single organization that collects all that money, all that data, and has the sole responsibility of making sure you get paid.

The MLC has no other job other than to make sure you get paid. Well, Michelle, if that's the case, then what happened to all that money that was just sitting there that didn't seem to go out to all the songwriters? It sat there. Because the information wasn't correct. Because the information wasn't correct, it sat in, it sat over on the digital services side. And then about, what is it, a month ago, maybe a month, five weeks ago, it got, it actually came over. The MLC. No, it actually came over to the MLC.

and that was the $424 million that everyone was sort of talking about. It's almost a half a million dollars. It's a lot of money. We were all kind of wondering what was it going to be. And that's the punchline to the MMA is $424 million. Let me just throw in a couple anecdotes here. One is our expectations were that we'll call the Black Box Fund euphemistically was that this money that the DSPs were holding would be between $250 and $500 million. That didn't include the settlement that was done with Spotify previous to this.

So that number is vastly larger than that. but this was the first time where we actually were able to see how significant these errors actually are. And when you're talking about the value of the entire publishing industry, you're talking about roughly 15% of the overall money that the publishing industry makes in a year was now given to us as a bump. But all this money goes there. And my question is, Chris, I mean, how are you going to distribute that money?

And, you know, for those who say that, well, isn't the MLC just going to hold it and then distribute it amongst market share amongst publishers who have, you know, a certain percentage of the business? I mean, what happens to this $424 million? Yeah. So the short answer is nothing is going to happen to it immediately because we are still waiting. for the services to deliver another set of data related to all this money. They have until June 15th to do it. But our job will then be to try to match as much of that money as possible to the right payee, the right publisher or the right self-administered songwriter, whoever is entitled

to receive that money. And I think it's important to note a couple things. Some of that money dates back many years. I think the earliest period that a service identified that they were paying the money over to us, maybe as far back as 2007, like the earliest days of the earliest streaming services. But we know a lot of that money is also from as recently as last December, right? Because the services had until December to keep matching any unmatched royalties they had, and then they had to hand over that money if they decided to do that on February 15th.

So some of the money is going to be very recent. And one of the things that I know you will appreciate and Michelle touch on it before is if you're a solo singer-songwriter and you record your song and you have 100 percent, that's a pretty easy thing to register, right? You put your song out in the world, you register 100 percent, you're done. But a lot of songs today, I'm sure a lot of songs that both of you have written, they could have 10 writers, 12, 15 writers. And it may take months, sometimes years, to track down everybody, figure out what the shares are, agree on all that. So when you think about, a song that was made available on a service in December of this past year, there's a really good

chance that the splits aren't even worked out yet. So some of that money is very recent money, and we know that there has always been a bit of a lag in getting works registered because of those types of challenges. I say that because the good news there is some of that more recent money is probably very knowable. We'll have that information. It's not a decade old where the data was lost to time and no one knows what it was. So again, our job is to try to match it. I'm very optimistic that we'll be able to match a lot of it. The MLC's goal is to match every single dollar of it. That's always going to be the goal, 100%. I'll throw this in defense of the MLC is that by law the MLC is required to get this money out within two years. And they

have chosen to make it three years voluntarily. Isn't that correct in order to add the extra year before distributing it amongst publishers? It's a little more nuanced and more favorable than that. The law sets some minimums. So at a minimum, we have to try to match it for three years, but for some of the historical money, right? If it dates back to 2010 or 2015, the three-year clock started when the DSP accrued it. Well, obviously, we just got the money in February. So it was just three years from when it was accrued by the DSP, then the period would be over before we got the money. So the law said, but for that older stuff, you have to hold it at least until January of 2023. So that's the earliest that we could do any market share distribution is January 23

for stuff that's been held for more than three years. And then for any new money that we now collect, new blanket royalties that may be unmatched, it's got to be held for at least three years. And during that three-year window, we have to try to match it. But the key is those are minimums. They're not maximums. And what we have said, the MLC, and what our board has said is that we're committed to holding it longer and trying to match it for as long as that's meaningful. And we actually talked a lot about that over the last couple of days in a roundtable

the Copyright Office sponsored on this very subject. And I think you heard pretty broad consensus among all the people participating that we should and our goal is to hold this money and try to match it for longer than those minimum periods. Because we know that there's more work to be done. Sorry to interrupt. I want you to use the great analogy of the popcorn popping. Yes. I wish I could remember which speaker mentioned it so I could give him credit.

Was it Kevin? I think it was Sam Sokol. Sam Sokol who said it's like making popcorn. You kind of put it in the microwave and you throw it in there for a while or you put it on the stove. And then you check every so often to see. not how much popcorn you've made, but how many kernels are left, right? Because you don't want to waste the kernels that are still at the bottom of the pot.

And in the same way. So do you leave it in? When do you stop? When do you take it out? If they're still actively popping, then you leave it in. So he used that analogy. I like it because they have snacks.

And it let me know, like, it made it real. Like, I think if you're actively in the process of matching, they're not going to take the popcorn out like before it's done. Like, they're going to let it keep popping. But it's actually. even better to run with the analogy. And I'll use the example of microwave popcorn, because this happens with microwave popcorn. The problem with microwave popcorn is you can't

open the bag until you take it out and you start to eat it. So you sit there and you smell it, fills up your house with that smell of 100% natural butter, probably not, and whatever else they put in it that makes it so amazing. And at some point, you just open the microwave, you're like, I got to eat it. And you know there's enough popcorn in there. But for the MLC, as we match this activity, we're going to pay it out. So you're going to get to eat your popcorn as soon as it's ready, and we're going to keep cooking the kernels that are not ready. And then that way, we're going to pay out money as we match it, but keep trying to match money that we're not able to immediately match. And it's only at some point in the future,

years from now, when we look at the bottom of the pot, we've eaten all the popcorn because we've distributed all the money that was ready, and we'll look and see, okay, how many kernels are left, and how much progress have we made on that. And there will probably come a point where the matching ceases to pop many more kernels because the data that we've got is not good and we've tried everything we can think of to reach people and we're no longer matching. And at that point, the market share distribution was meant to ensure that the MLC as an organization didn't keep sitting on money that it could otherwise distribute to the songwriters and publishers it had paid. So that's the key the market share. If there's a song that has 75% of the right of,

are accountable, but the 25% is what's missing. It's the 25% that gets distributed to the market share people in the end, right? Or is it if a song has no writers on it? What percentage of the song? You're right the first time. If I can match 25% of a song to you, Ross, and I can match 25% to Michelle, you're going to get paid. We're not going to wait because we can't find the other 50%. Now, in that situation, there's a lot we can do and you can do to find the other 50% because In some instances, not all, but in some instances, you may have been in a room with the other people who have the 50%. But we also know that these days, right, lots of times you might record a piece of a track and hand it to a producer and you never see the other people. So it's not a foregone conclusion that because we can find you and Michelle that we can also find the other people that wrote the song.

But it will never impact you. Why doesn't the remaining 50% get distributed amongst the knowable writers? Well, it essentially does. because the way that we'll distribute the money is by distributing that pool that's left over to everyone who got paid before. And that way, what market share really means is if you got paid some royalties for that period

when we were able to match, you'll get then a pro rata share, a proportionate share of what's left. Very cool. So everybody gets a little more. This is one of the things that I said to someone on a panel recently where you realize the importance of, getting your splits. Any manager

or publisher who's listening to this, remember that when your writer doesn't submit their splits, at the end of the year, it's going to be funneled through the MLC, not directly to you from the DSPs, and you now

are going to have to go through a process of having, you know, it will, my imagine is that the distribution of those funds, no matter what, are going to be slower. because it has to go through the MLC, correct? So getting your splits right is an easy way to make sure that it doesn't go through

this unmatched fund, correct? Well, you know, we're going to account monthly, and so we'll be rerunning the matching every month. So it's not so much that it would delay it. It's more the idea that the longer you wait, the greater the risk that you may not get the money, right? And you certainly, in the short, term, the risk is that let's go back to the analogy of, you know, four people or three people,

right? If it was supposed to be a third, a third, a third, those are the shares. But you and Michelle, you register right away and you actually thought you each were supposed to get 50. If the third person waits a year, we're going to pay out each of you 50 percent because we don't know there's another person. And if you don't flag that for us, we're just going to pay that money thinking we're paying everybody. And then a year from now, when someone comes out, it's actually I had a share, now that person's going to have to try to chase the money that was already paid to the two of you and dispute the existing registrations to get their share in. So again, there's no benefit in the short term to waiting.

And then the long term, let's say you wait five years. Well, maybe five years from now we do that market share distribution. Now your money has gone out and you and Michelle got a piece of it because you registered your works. And again, that unmatched money that we ultimately distribute that way gets divided among everyone who did get paid. So by being really, really late, you're basically giving up that money and other songwriters who are more diligent will benefit. When you have a song that has multiples of three, you always will have some point a one. And I find that when you, you know, because

if you have, somebody has to register 33.3.34 or otherwise, you either end up down point a 1 or you end up over up to 0.02 and you have 100.02% of a song. How do you distribute that 0.01%? I, we rotate it. Like, if I write, I write with two other people, my regular co-writers. And so we always are thirds and we just rotate the extra percentage. That's really cool. But I'm in control of, I mean, I submit our Q sheets. So I just, you know, I'm in control of it. I think if, you know, then it's incumbent upon you.

If you're not in control of your cue sheets or registrations to tell your manager or your publisher, like, hey, I wrote with these people, it's, you know, these two other people, we're going to rotate the extra 1%. I mean, it's always cool. It's a point of one. I'm just wondering, this is a random question. But it becomes, it's a conversation that happens every time you're one of three writers. So it's always cooler to be. be cool. If you're fighting over 0.01 of a percent

like... No, but in the end, you're looking at the MLC if you type... Well, we'll get to this in a second, but when you type in your song in the MLC database, we typed in one of mine and it said 100. And I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. So that 0.01, I just am curious

how, is that disseminated equally amongst those writers? If you have a $10 million song over the life of its copyright, you know, it's nothing. Yeah, you're talking about the other situation. What happens if everybody claims the point four and then it's over a little bit, which potentially would mean you be collecting more than that. And we would, we would not pay out more than 100%. So I think we would take that down in some equal way. If each of you claim 0.3, then there'll be a 0.1 missing. You would see that.

You would see the share. So I think what Michelle described is the right practice. And actually, what really dictates all of this. It's not the MLC's job to answer that question. It's the songwriters or the publisher's job. And that's one of the fundamental premises of how the MLC is set up. The MLC doesn't decide the answer. We provide the ability for you

as the right soldiers to provide the answer because I don't want to be the one response for deciding who gets the extra point one. And I don't want to have to figure out how do I take people now so that it gets the 100. I'd rather have you all decide that. And part of it was because when we were going through songs the other day, we found a song where two publishers were claiming a third of it,

which has since been resolved. Thank you to the MLC. It was actually the first time that I had gone through the portal and really seen how it works. It's fine if you're looking up a song where it's where your co-writers are responsible. Everyone puts in the percentage. It's very clear. Everybody gets their 25% high five. That's the song. Everyone's getting paid. We're happy. But we went by one of the songs and the splits were wrong.

The splits weren't wrong. There were multiple people claiming the same splits. That has since been resolved. But that's where I found the MLC interesting. Until you go into the portal, go to the website. So you go to www. TheMLC.com and you start typing in songs.

This is public. This is... Go to the yellow button. Yellow button on the top right. Public search, nice and bright. Click that. Then you go to the screen where you can start typing in your name.

If you're a publisher, go through all your writer's songs. And you can actually probably see the splits and who's claiming what and it's very public. And then you can go to your administrator and discuss how to resolve some of these issues who their admin department will probably go to the MLC and straighten it out if they don't do it on their own. Michelle? I just want to say also go through any iterations of your name.

Like any versions of your name too? Because I found like there's like three Michelle Lewis is. I'm Michelle R. Lewis. There's another Michelle Lewis. Because you can find other names. So it's good to sort of use any, you know, Mish Lewis, like, you know, just whatever else your name might be. Chris, how often are these, are DSPs required to release their unmatched funds? Do they have to release it every year to you?

Well, so the good news now is there will be no unmatched funds from DSPs because, again, they have to give us their usage reports each month. So they have to tell us all of the sound recordings that were used on their service. If it was a streaming service, every sound recording that was streamed, the number of streams, a bunch of other data, and then they've got to pay us the royalties that are due on all of those. Period. So it's like we're billing them for everything without knowing yet who gets the money. Because then on our end, we're matching, we're doing the matching to figure,

out, do we know who to pay? Are we not sure who to pay? If we know, then we will match and pay that out in the next royalty distribution. We'll also account monthly. And if we don't, then we'll put that into an unmatched account that we maintain in an account that bears interest. The law requires that as well. So the DSPs will no longer have unmatched monies for digital audio mechanicals. The MLC will have it. But you'll always know that. One, because right now, if you went to the website and did what we just talked about, as you saw the other day, Ross and I know Michelle saw, if you wrote a song and your share is not claimed, there'll be a little circle next to the title of the song, and in it will be the percentage of the song that's been registered, and it'll be less than 100. So if you

wrote a song with three other people, but you didn't register your share, everyone else did, there'll be a circle right next to the title that song that says 75%. And it's in blue. So it's really obvious. And that's the cue to all the writers say, hey, one of us didn't register it. And if you didn't register it, then we're not going to be able to pay you. How do we know, Michelle,

why would we trust another organization to be controlling money that should be going to songwriters? Well, I mean, the good news, bad news about the MLC is that their government entity, the entity, I'm sure they'd rather is probably a giant pain in the

asked to have to deal with the government oversight and the public comments and input. But it's ours. You know, the good news is that it's ours and that we can comment. And it is transparent. I mean, transparency, and Chris has been amazing about just saying transparency over and over again. I mean, that is why we trust them, because we can see it all. Yeah, and a lot of the people who are on the board are actually songwriters. So that helps too.

And Chris, you know, like if I'm checking this thing, you know, the first question I've been getting is, oh, that means I must have a lot of money sitting out there in the universe. So I can just look up the song and it should say how much money I have coming to me, right? It will. Not yet. But that's because, again, we're only now getting money. We haven't paid anybody yet. So we won't know that yet. Once we start getting that money and processing it, if you're a member.

which means that you are a self-administered songwriter, you collect your mechanicals yourself, you'll see in the portal your account how much we're paying you. If you're a publisher, we'll show how much we're paying the publisher. So the money will be in there. But the rights, the rights themselves,

that's there now and that will always be there for everyone to see. So if you're a published songwriter, if you work with a publishing company, you're still going to get paid by your publisher, right? The MMA didn't change your deal with your publisher, didn't change the way you get paid. You're still going to see your data on what you get from your publisher, but you're going to see all the rights that we used to pay your publisher. And that's why, again, it's so important. Every songwriter can go, look their names up,

look their songs up. Because even if every song you ever wrote is managed by a publisher, covered by a publishing deal, you can still see whether the works were set up correctly or not. Okay, so I'm published by Warner Chapel. I go through my songs and I think, man, I'm about to find some cash. But I go and it doesn't show me how much money I'm going to make because I'm published by Warner Chapel. That means I have to go to Warner Chapel and ask them how much I made on this song, correct? Yes. And this is what we talked about the last time we talked.

And it's a really important message. It's one that Michelle and Sona have been phenomenal about communicating. And the way I said it the other day was the pathway to your money is through your data. If you want to know where your money is, check your data. That was the damn quote. Okay, sorry, keep going. Right. I'm not the songwriter, but the pathway to your money is through your data.

If your data is right, the money will flow. Now, how much that is if you're assigned a chapel, yeah, you've got to look at your chapel statements, talk to Warner Chappell. because under your deal with Chapel, right, they collect all the money they collect from every source in the world. And then they divide it up between you and them based on what your deal says, right? So every writer may have a different deal, different splits. The MLC doesn't know that. We're not party to your publishing deal. I have no idea what that looks like. But you can see the data. So if you wrote a hit song, right, we were talking about the end of the day because my house,

big hit in my house, you wrote my house. If you went to the MLC's database and my house was missing, you immediately know there's a problem because if it's not in our database, we don't have a way to pay you. When you look it up, though, and you say, hey, 100% claimed and you check the splits, everything's right, now you know the money is going to flow through from us to you as long as we're matching all the uses of My House, the sound recording that the digital services have to your song. So again, that's the piece we still have to do, but it's a whole lot easier for us to make that connection if everything is registered and it's in our system. If none of it's registered, we can't match something to nothing.

It's interesting. I guess the assumption is that we can, that you can go through your database and, you know, especially if you have a hit song, that all the covers will also be registered properly. But it has sort of an ancillary effect. if you have the information wrong and you have a ton of remixes, they'll probably all be wrong. So it shows why it's important to have it in there correct from the beginning.

Yes. And being able to see it is so important, right? Like there's so many situations at life. I mean, think about driving down the road, right? What you're doing every second you drive is you're kind of calibrating the steering wheel with what your eyes see. and if the car drifts a little to the right, you're like, up, I've got to move the wheel the other way to kind of stay in the road. Well, it's the same thing with registering works, especially if you've got lots of remixes, right? They all might be slightly different.

It's really hard to know if you've done it right, if you can't see the results. If all you can do is sort of throw some information out there for your piece of it and then not know what everything else is, now with the MLC database, certainly, you'll see all the pieces. So just as we did the other day, you can look at that fourth remix and you can see whether it's set up right or not. Heck, you can see whether the fourth remix is even.

there. And that's another thing, right? Maybe that got lost in the shuffle because, you know, the first three remixes got registered and people didn't realize there was a fourth one. Now you're going to be like, hey, there's a fourth remix. And it's really important. We need to get that registered. Everybody can see that. So I think that's another really powerful part of transparency. We talk about this a lot. Before the MMA, all of this was still happening. This was still being done, but it was being done by private organizations. And it was being done by their employees. And that meant that there was always a limited number of people who could be looking at that at any given time. The MLC is a nonprofit organization. It's actually not a government organization. We are

regulated by the government, but we are not a government organization. We are a private non-for-profit organization. We're relatively small. We're about 65 employees now. We're not going to have thousands of employees. But every single rights holder that we pay and every songwriter in the world that's ever written a song, has the ability to look at the data and to contribute toward making sure the data is as accurate as possible. That's the power of the MLC, is it's not about the 65 or 80 people that work for us on our team. It's about everyone in the community who is entitled to be paid in some way looking at their stuff. And that now could be hundreds of thousands of people looking at their 100 songs, their 50 songs, their two songs. That's going to be much better for

everybody in the long run than any company, any organization could ever do on their own. Michelle, why, if there's this organization, why would anybody do a publishing deal or an admin deal if there's an organization that can collect your mechanicals for you? I think this is going to change the role of publishing companies, particularly for XUS. I mean, you still need somebody collecting outside of the U.S. because we have to be clear that like MLC is for US only. So you would probably want, you'll need somebody to collect outside of the States for you. But yeah, I mean, it definitely, a publisher is going to have to step it up a little bit.

And you know what? There's still other rights that need collecting. There's still lyric rights and sync rights and CD rights. The MLC is very limited under the law. We can only administer mechanicals for digital audio uses. So, you know, putting aside the fact that all the stuff we just talked about is really complicated, right? If you've written 150 songs, managing the data, the splits on 150 songs is a lot of work. And then if you have to do that in other places, both here and outside the U.S., because you're a global artist, a global writer, and you have video rights and lyric rights, and people still release your songs on CDs and other formats, that's still a ton of work.

So I think the answer to the question is there's still a whole lot that publishers can do and will do. And I think for each songwriter, the choice is, you know, how do I want to set up my business? Goes back to what you said at the beginning, right? This is empowering for every songwriter because it allows them to see how things are being done. But they still have that choice to make. Do I want to spend more of my time doing this or do I want to spend more of my time writing and then find a trusted partner who can do this for me? And, you know, does this well because it's not easy. One of the things we found in doing all these, like, informational webinars and things like that is the information gap for songwriters is not so much about, you know, we understand publishing in that we've had publishers and there's that kind of inspiration alchemy that publishers bring, you know, and yentaing, like the writer combinations and pitching songs and selling songs, you know, selling things, selling your work.

but then there's this other piece of publishing that's administration that no one knows about, like no one I know wants to deal with or knows about, like how many times have you been on like the HFA website? I mean, this was one of the conversations when we found this song that was registered improperly. I called the woman who does the admin for this writer and she said I will handle it and have a and have a back. to you in 24 hours. And I called that writer and I said, that's why you have a publisher. Isn't because the registering

in the first place is that if something goes wrong, you're going to spend 48 hours tracking down who the right splits are and who are all these things. A good admin administration company or a publishing company is going to have the resources to track down this missing information. And my eyes glaze over the second

even think about doing that stuff. I've never, I never, I thought Harry Fox was a person. I thought I was a dude for the first like 10 years at one point. Probably was at one point. But like whenever people would talk about Harry Fox, I'd be like, why don't I care about Harry Fox? So I am completely guilty of this. I got a publishing deal like two years into writing songs. So I've never, never had to become a publisher. But that's the information gap is that song writers don't, they have to learn how to be publishers. I'm not the sexy fun part of publishing, but like the administrative part of publishing. That's what we've been sort of filling in. And that involves codes, ISRCs, ISWCs, your IPI, your publishing IPI, and we've been

educating songwriters at Sona on those codes so that they can do these things themselves. But if they choose to have an admin deal or sign me the publisher, they don't have to, but they should anyway, because you want to kind of keep track of what you're a partner with your publishers. You want to keep track with what they're doing anyway. Yeah, there's a stereotype of, you know, record labels to artists, publishers, to writers that for some reason they're not doing enough either side. And nobody seems to really recognize that these are your business partners. Some people do. Probably the ones who make the most amount of money end up feeling that way because they end up having to use each other more in this negotiation.

So, you know, I'm also a proponent of publishers and admin, because I believe that they do more than just make sure the, you know, the information is correct. But as we see with the MLC, this is this database, what's amazing about this database isn't just the unmatched money. To me, what's amazing about this is it creates an easy environment for future DSPs to exist. because there's going to be public information, no longer do you have to have the infrastructure as a Spotify, as an Apple, to run your company. You now have a database that is very clear

and is run by songwriters, so you're not going to get sued if you decide to start a DSP if you're so fortunate to have that kind of funding. So this opens up some things that we didn't really discuss, but there's no question that this is good for the entire industry. And how often has the entire industry agreed on anything before?

I would say that this might be it. Do you guys have anything to add to this episode? I just think you made a great point. And I'd like to echo it, Ross, that none of this would have happened had there not been a broad consensus among all of the parties you mentioned, writers, publishers, and the digital services that there was a better way to do this. And I think everybody, every one of those groups suffered under the old system.

It was not working. Publishers were often just as much in the dark about what the data looked like as a songwriter was because they didn't have better visibility. So I think for everybody, the MMA and the MLC represents a step forward, I think it will allow each party to do their job better. I think the role of publishers and administrators is even more valuable now than it was before because they actually have the tools to do that work even more effectively.

And as Michelle said, they bring so much other things to the table. But I also think the fact that a self-administered songwriter just starting out, right, maybe a kid on a college campus or high school kid who's recording in a bedroom for the first time, the fact that they can not only get their music into the world on these digital services, but also get paid for the songs they write at that age, that's phenomenal. And then if they turn out to be super successful, if they become the next Michelle Lewis, the next Ross Golan, they're already connected to that revenue stream. And when they do their first publishing deal, they say, hey, all my stuff that I've done today that's already there,

we'll work out our deal. I'll hand the keys over to you. You can drive all that admin so I can do my other stuff. And it's seamless. That's going to be incredibly powerful over time. So the MMA is going to make it better for writers, for publishers, and for the digital services, and it's going to ensure that people get paid. And that, again, that's the goal, is making sure that people get paid. Michelle, anything like to add? I mean, we created a subcommittee of Sona called Smag, which stands for Sexy Metadata action group, because even though metadata, you know, your eyes blaze over when you hear that

word. Getting paid is sexy and metadata is the path to getting paid. So we have some smag swag that's kind of badass. Perfect. Go to theMLc.com. Go to sona.org? Is that what it is? We are sona.com. We are sona.com. Donate to we are sona.com and become a member because as we don't have a union, it's trade organizations like Sona. that literally go to DC and fight on your behalf. It's super important to support them. And if you are curious about any of your works, go to theMLC.com and they are interactive.

So if you have questions, they are there to answer you. They have humans that will literally answer your damn call, your damn email. If you have questions about your splits, they literally are there to help. And if we can make databases like this successful, that means that there's more money that comes to songwriters, which makes our industry more powerful in our community healthier.

So thank you guys for joining us on And The Writer Is. That is your episode. Thanks, Ross. That was awesome, man. Thank you both. Thanks for listening to this episode of And The Writer is. If you want to hear music from this songwriter I just interviewed, be sure to check out our Spotify playlist.

Or visit our website and, and the writer is.com. If you like what we're doing, please subscribe to us. You can also like us on Facebook and Twitter. And The Writer Is is produced by Joe London, edited by Miles Bergsmah, and published by Big Deal Music. A special thanks to David Silverstein from Mega House Music and Michael White. Until next time, this is Ross Golan.