Rights-management firm Audiam has published some new figures about its business, including the fact that it has collected more than $120m of royalties for its clients over the last four years. What’s more, the company says that more than 15% of those collections were ‘recovered’ royalties – income earned by musicians but which had not been paid to them by music services.
Audiam has been a dogged chaser-up of so-called ‘black box’ (unpaid) royalties, with CEO Jeff Price prominent in the debate around Spotify’s mechanical licensing in the US, which led to several class-action lawsuits on behalf of songwriters. “When we launched Audiam we discovered that many compositions were not licensed, the ones that were licensed had non-compliant and inaccurate statements with over 80% of the recordings of a composition not getting paid on,” said Price in a statement. “With the passage of the MMA, it’s even more imperative we get this money into the hands of the songwriters and publishers that earned it before it becomes eligible to be taken from them and distributed to other music publishers that did not earn it.”
The figures have been announced as part of the push for Audiam’s new Omega ‘intelligent audit system’, which launched recently.
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