Shining a light inside the royalties Black Box
Blokur’s matching system finds royalties that could not be paid out before
Find yourself in a socially-distanced conversation with a music publisher or songwriter and sooner or later the topic will turn to the topic of the Black Box. Estimates for the value of black box royalties — royalties that cannot be paid out because the rights holder is not identified — range from $250m to $2.5bn globally.
One of the things that makes it such an irresistible topic for us music publishing enthusiasts is that this money is just sitting there, slightly out of view, and some of it might be our money. But despite the name, not all parts of the black box are “dark”. In fact when a rights holder cannot be identified, very often a list of unmatched usages is released, whether privately or publicly. The challenge is turning all of these spreadsheets and PDFs into cash. And usually that means publishers going through unclaimed royalty reports line-by-line looking for songs they recognise.
I have written before about Blokur’s sub-graph matching system, which treats each song or individual as a web of relationships in order to generate more matches with a higher degree of accuracy.
Last week we ran an experiment to see what would happen if we applied this approach to unclaimed royalty reports. We picked a small file of unclaimed usages at random, and put it through our matching algorithm. Sure enough, we found dozens of previously unmatched usages of our clients’ works, some of them worth thousands of dollars per song.
That’s money that might otherwise be sitting around for years waiting for somebody to claim it. And more pertinently for Blokur’s music publisher clients, it’s money that is rightfully theirs but until now has been stuck in the system. At Blokur there’s nothing we like more than finding new value for our publisher clients — especially when it’s as easy as running a file through our matching system - so this was a pretty exciting result. The next step is to repeat it at scale.
But of course, we can only match unclaimed royalties to your songs if those songs are registered with Blokur. So if you’re a music publisher reading this and thinking, “I wouldn’t mind finding out if there’s some royalties of mine in that Black Box”, why not drop us a line.
