Easing Manual Matching and Reducing Suspended Royalties
How Blokur can help royalty departments match royalties with their songs
Before starting at Blokur over a year ago, I spent over three years in the royalty department of a major publisher processing royalties. Most royalties are automatically matched, but since data attached to royalties coming in is not always consistent (especially with countless global revenue sources), a high value of publishing royalties need to be manually matched to the right works.
In order to do this, royalty departments need to cross reference the information attached to the royalties with internal and external information. These external information sources end up being PRO’s, MRO’s, Allmusic, Discogs and other various music metadata sites. After having matched countless songs, one realises that the further down the data delivery chain the source is, the less reliable the information is. If you find the data is inconsistent across these external sources, it’s hard to know which has the correct information. As a processor if you are not sure what song to match the royalty to, then you move on to the next work and the money just sits there.
Blokur’s database shows the global rights picture of songs with data delivered directly from publishers. If I had access to a resource like that when I worked in royalties, I could’ve matched more works and matched them more confidently and quicker. That in turn would mean songwriters are getting paid closer to what their songs are actually procuring.
Every publisher has a long list of suspended works that take a lot of time and effort to match, and with a reliable source it would be much easier to do so. As more and more publishers send us works and we continue to build a reliable global rights picture, the easier and less unnecessarily time consuming the job of royalty processors/coordinators becomes.
Just like many PRO repertoires, our database of over 5 million works is free and available to see by signing up for a Blokur Search account.
If you are interested in learning more about this function or learning more about what Blokur does, feel free to reach out at derek@blokur.com
