20-50% of royalties never reach the artist, study finds

Artists aren’t sometimes getting screwed in the digital era. According to the latest research, they are systematically and routinely missing as much as half of their royalties on an ongoing basis. “Unfortunately, the adage ‘follow the money’ leads only to a dense thicket of micropayments and ‘black boxes’ where relationships among rights, royalties, processes, and participants, in the eyes of many, are deliberately obscured or, at best, have become hopelessly complex and outdated,” notes a just-released report from Rethink Music, an initiative of Berklee’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship. “Payable events—performances, recordings, publications—occur, but the resulting payments that trickle back to recording artists, writers, and producers are based on a series of outdated frameworks, technologies, formulas, and methods that are demonstrably unable to keep pace with the state of music creation and consumption today.” http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2015/07/15/20-50-of-royalties-never-reach-the-artist-study-finds https://www.berklee.edu/sites/default/files/Fair%20Music%20-%20Transparency%20and%20Payment%20Flows%20in%20the%20Music%20Industry.pdf http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/6633630/this-is-an-important-subject-says-riaa-in-response-to-berklee-report https://riaa.com/media/C8DB1C0B-7890-8494-2D02-AA02382F4C67.pdf Fair Music - Transparency and Payment Flows in the Music Industry THE MUSIC BUSINESS IN THE DIGITAL AGE