The Great Song Registration Meltdown of 2020–2021 (Edited Version)
Tags: Music Business, Data, Media, Music, Digital Marketing

BMI writes that:

Songs registered online (at BMI.com) show up in the BMI.com Repertoire and Online Services Catalog application the next day. Titles that do not auto-register require additional processing and may take between 1–7 business days to become available.

ASCAP writes that:

It may take up to seven days to process a new registration.

Many musicians rely on a third party — known as a publishing administrator — to register their songs with these performance rights organizations. So those BMI and ASCAP timelines wouldn’t apply to those using a publishing administrator. Using a third party could take from a week and should at most take three to five months on average. I will dig into how third party song registrations work a bit more deeper in the post.

Songs I recorded with my music group FSQ were submitted for registration with BMI in July of 2020 via my publishing administrator Songtrust. These didn’t appear in BMI’s repertory until 9 months later, late April 2021. And the songs submitted to BMI via Songtrust did not fully appear, only five out of eight songs submitted today in the BMI repertory search.

Also, if there are any errors in filing a song registration, getting those fixed seems impossible. Example here is: another song writer — “Charles Fishman” — was accidentally entered for my writing work on a collaboration with Alex Vans of the group, Bad Business Club. Alex is affiliated with ASCAP. I’m actually “Charles Elliot Fishman” in the world of music publishing, and affiliated with BMI, so we entered the following fix in December of 2020 via ASCAP’s online dashboard.

An update made to the writers of a song on ASCAP.com made in December 2020

In the above screen shot you see that the fix was made in December 2020, and Charles Elliot Fishman was entered at ASCAP.com, as the correct songwriter on this production. However six months later ASCAP still shows the other “Charles Fishman” the mistaken entry, as the writer on this production.

I’m a BMI affiliated songwriter going as “Charles Elliot Fishman” but in the original registration an ASCAP writer “Charles Fishman” was entered instead, by accident.

Even if you don’t know about “song registrations” you would be able to comprehend that a data change made directly with the provider of a database should NOT take months to reflect said change.

Why does the speed of song registrations matter? A musical artist could drop a new song on TikTok coming right out of the recording studio one night, and find that song has billions of listens the next day via TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify and a myriad of other video and music streaming services. If the song isn’t registered properly, publishing royalties aren’t coming in on that fast moving hit.

Three to Five Months to Register a Song

My music group FSQ released an album in 2020 via Soul Clap Records. Part of the plan for release was to have Soul Clap Records own the publishing on the FSQ release. Given Songtrust’s vast expertise in publishing administration and proven track record of serving independent artists, I asked Soul Clap Records to consider moving their music publishing administration over to Songtrust in advance of the release. Soul Clap Records is an artist run record label, led by the dance music duo Soul Clap (Eli Goldstein and Charles Levine) and has a publishing arm, which today is a catalog of about 500 songs. Considering the size of the catalog and how well known Soul Clap is, we certainly got the white glove treatment in terms of onboarding the music publishing catalog to Songtrust.

In July 2020, the eight songs from the FSQ album were submitted to Songtrust and were to be registered via Songtrust with our PRO, BMI. In October of 2020, I expected to see these songs registered at BMI via their public facing search portal known as “Repertory Search” but they were missing by that date.

Given my previous experience with my music attorney being able to quickly file and register songs with BMI, the missing songs seem unexpected.

I contacted Songtrust about the missing song registrations. I was told “there is currently a delay in BMI processing our song registrations. We have been told it can take as long as six months for songs to appear on the public repertoire.”

I mentioned earlier that prior to 2020, a week long period all the way up to three to five month timeline for registrations made by third parties into BMI and ASCAP was common place. So why the delays?

PROs, Publishing Administrators — Millions of New Songs to Register, Drowning in Data

To get a better understanding of what’s going on in the world of publishing beyond the mega deals where major artists are selling off their publishing and other music rights for millions, look to Synchtank’s music publishing 2021 research report “Drowning in Data: Royalty Accounting and Systems in the Digital Age”

One graph that stood out to me was the following.

How many more songs to keep track of and how many royalty sources ?? One music publisher records a 4500% growth rate in data processing ??

Another graph I noted from the Synchtank report, was data from the major UK based PRO, PRS for Music. This side by side graph shows the expense of processing all the increased song data is depressing revenue return on their work to collect royalties.

With the music publishing industry facing an explosion of data with increasing data processing costs, you begin to wonder if publishers, and the PROs will be able to build quickly and invest enough resources to keep up.

ASCAP and BMI did make one big investment in data in 2020, they built a joint repertory search database called Songview.

That being said, the explosion of song data isn’t going to just go away. Another 2021 research report on music publishing was also recently released, this one by MIDiA Research is titled “Rebalancing The Song Economy”. Variety reviews the report and summarizes it: “ a new royalty model is necessary if songwriters are to survive, let alone undertake the kind of ‘risk-taking’ and ‘creativity’ that moves music forward.’

The report’s author, Björn Ulvaeus, a member of the legendary Swedish music group, calls the current model “dysfunctional”.

Björn Ulvaeus is also the President of CISAC, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, a consortium of sorts that includes all the PROs and other royalty collection societies all across the globe, including BMI and ASCAP. The organization also maintains the common standard technologies for music publishing including a data format known as Common Works Registrations (CWR) that allow song registrations to be properly delivered to PROs all over the world, and thereby registered.

If Ulvaeus feels the current publishing model (which would include song registrations as part of the model) “dysfunctional”, he is certainly currently in the position as president to ask CISAC members to streamline their processes and invest in data processing power so that delays are less common.

Some music technology partners are stepping into the mix to improve data processing related to music royalties, for instance Music Reports is partnering with PROs on this front. And the IFPI, The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, announced in 2021 that is working with music technology company BMAT and several Asia based performance royalty organizations to create SoundSys, a “fully scalable, shared system for the distribution of sound recording performance rights revenue around the world.”

But are recent these efforts enough to keep up with the flow of data and processing requirements?

If 60,000 new songs are appearing at Spotify daily, and even only 1/2 of those songs are being registered with PROs or via publishing companies, it is still a huge volume of song data to process, given each song can have multiple songwriters affiliated with multiple PROs and multiple publishers.

Could the data processing issues be the reason myself and other songwriters experienced song registration delays in 2020 and into 2021

Hunting Down, Validating Song Registrations

To make matters more complicated, NOT every PRO has a public facing song repertory search like US PRO’s BMI and ASCAP have. So it can be hard to discern if a work you wrote has been properly registered if it is being submitted through a foreign based PRO.

In the following case, a song I co-wrote and produced with a UK artist, was registered with a UK publishing firm affiliated with the UK’s PRS for Music. The writers (me and one other) are affiliated with BMI, and we are not able to log on to PRS for Music to check the song registrations, as we are not members of PRS and that’s the only way you can search their database.

Eventually, our shares of the work should appear in BMI repertory search, but again we are finding the delays to be extended without any insight into what a proper timeframe would be.

A UK publisher who registered a collaboration I made with an artist affiliated with PRS for Music UK validates that our song is in the PRS database, but our BMI affiliated contribution is not yet appearing at BMI’s repertory search (email from April 2021)

Is there a way to track the registration of your songs globally? Maybe. For the past several years, CISAC (the organization I mentioned that is the collective body representing PROs across the globe) has been working on the CIS-Net for Rights Holders Initiative. The idea of CIS-Net is a global look up for song data ; CIS-Net is a global network of databases that share the metadata associated with musical repertoire. So in my case, if I had access to it, I could see where this UK based song collaboration I mentioned, is currently in terms of being registered at PRS for Music and also BMI. I could have skipped reaching out to the UK publisher as I did above.

The CIS-Net “Rights Holder Initiative” is designed empower songwriters, composers, and music publishers to search repertoire and interested party information (IPI) on the CIS-Net worldwide database. Unfortunately, it is not as democratic as they make it sound, you would need to get approval from your home PRO to access CIS-Net. I searched the BMI website and found no FAQ on how to get access to the CIS-Net.

CIS-Net for Rights-Holders besides looking like a Web 1.0 website from 1995, seems practically impossible to access for US songwriters

If you think you can get your PRO to give you a sign up key to access the CIS-Net for Rights Holders, you will find the site here:

https://cisnetrha.cisac.org/

A private French data company called Quansic recently stepped into the world of song registration data search (and beyond to other sources, for instance, Discogs data), but their search engine is a paid service.

A Community of Songwriters Experiencing Registration Delays

Back to tracking down the registrations of my songs that I composed here in the U.S. Remember that in late 2020, I was told by Songtrust, my publishing administrator that it could “take up to six months for songs to appear in BMI repertory”. In January 2021, now more than six months after I initially registered 8 songs with the firm (an album), I filed a support ticket with Songtrust. Given COVID, I was told support tickets were talking longer than usual to respond to at Songtrust. The sub headline of this post is “some independent publishers find their work slowed by technological updates, a rapidly expanding universe of new songs, and a global pandemic.” I get that the pandemic, short staffing etc could also be a cause of song registration delays. Heck, ASCAP even delayed royalty payments earned Q3 2019 that were due in April 2020, blaming the pandemic. It’s hard to fathom how money collected in 2019 would be impacted by the pandemic.

While I waited an answer from Songtrust, I asked music industry colleagues if they were experiencing any issues with their song registrations. By asking around I learned that both other Songtrust users, and non Songtrust users — including major music publishers — were also experiencing delays with their song registrations at BMI and ASCAP.

The more I raised the alarm about delays in terms of getting songs registered with PROs within online music industry forums and communities, the more I heard from other major noted publishers and third party registration companies interested in my own problems. I was told I was not alone with in terms of facing registration delays.

Several interested parties including a strong independent publisher, set up Zoom calls with me to discuss the problems. These conversations were fascinating but off the record. More discussions about the song registration delays with other effected songwriters occurred in Cherie Hu’s Patreon subscriber community, Water & Music, while others happened in an email list I am a member of called Pho, and even some users on Twitter were crowing about their own problems.

My intention with this post is to shine a light on the song registration delays to highlight it as an industry problem and understand what investments are being made to improve the song registration process.