Revenue Recovery: How to Recover Lost Music Royalties

There's no lost and found for your royalties. If you don't claim them, they don't come looking for you, and depending on where the money's sitting, you may only have a few years before it's gone for good.

This week we kick off a new thread inside our Rising Tide miniseries: the eight revenue multipliers in music. We're starting with revenue recovery, the money that's already been earned but never made it back to the artists, songwriters, and producers who are owed it. We talk to three companies attacking this problem from three different angles.

Jason Feinberg, who leads Kosign at Kobalt Music, breaks down why revenue recovery is such a persistent problem in the first place, the fundamentals every artist needs to register (PRO, MLC, SoundExchange), and why an hour spent getting your metadata in order might be the most profitable hour of your career.

Jeff Ponchick, co-founder and CEO of Mogul, explains how his company built something like "the Plaid of the music industry," centralizing royalty data across every platform an artist is owed money from, and why up to 50% of artist catalogs are registered incorrectly without anyone realizing it.

Rob Brown, chief revenue officer at mprs, zooms into a corner of revenue recovery almost nobody talks about: the master points owed to producers, mixers, engineers, and top line songwriters, and how something as small as an unsigned letter of direction can freeze a producer's income entirely.

If you're a music tech company solving problems like these, come demo on the beach and network with the ecosystem at the Music Tectonics Conference, October 27 to 29 in Santa Monica.

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Episode Transcript

Machine transcribed

Jason Feinberg

[00:00:00] Dmitri: We've been talking about the eight tech multipliers of revenue in music from catalog valuation to marketing tech to new licensing opportunities or new form factor products. And for today's episode, I wanna dive into one of the areas specifically, and that's revenue recovery. Covering the leaks in the system and uncovering revenue that's already supposed to be getting paid out.

Why not start there? Because you might have to find it or fight for it, but you don't have to invent it. it's legitimate revenue to grow the market for music. Our guest, Jason Feinberg, leads KOSIGN at Kobalt Music, empowering songwriters to collect their global royalties with speed, transparency, and control.

But that's not his only experience. He's held executive roles at Universal Music Group, Pandora, Concord, and Epitaph, where he scaled artist platforms to millions of users and rebuilt marketing ecosystems for iconic catalogs and led high-performing teams through multiple industry shifts. So there's a lot of background there that's gonna be helpful.

In fact, Jason's also a lecturer at UCLA, where he teaches an upper division digital marketing course that he developed for the music industry major. Hey, Jason, good to see you.

[00:01:09] Jason: Good to be here, Dmitri. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:12] Dmitri: Great. So let's dive in. When I say the two words revenue recovery, what comes to mind from your experience in the music industry?

[00:01:19] Jason: Oh, where to even begin? Uh, it's a complexity, if I had to come up with one word. Um, you know, the guiding principle here that impacts every royalty stream just about, and every level of artist, every type of career in this business, is that there's generally no lost and found for your royalties just-

[00:01:41] Dmitri: Oh, wow

[00:01:42] Jason: sitting there, right? It's... If you don't claim it, it doesn't come looking for you. Uh, it sits somewhere that's difficult to find, often dispersed globally in multiple places, and if you don't get to them soon enough, often they go elsewhere.

[00:01:59] Dmitri: Mm.

[00:01:59] Jason: And this has created a system that makes it wildly complicated and often difficult for artists, especially DIY, developing, independent artists without major infrastructure.

It makes it complicated to retrieve these and to stay on top of it. And if you think about why, it's right in front of us. The system, especially in publishing where I sit today, but this really applies to everything, the systems were built essentially for a 20th century model, right? And now we're living in a 21st century marketplace.

 you know, billions of transactions a minute and global reach for every artist potentially on the planet. Um, that's not the infrastructure, that's not the marketplace that existed when most of the current systems were built. So we have, uh, you know, it's not nefarious by design, but it is, complicated by design.

[00:02:58] Dmitri: Hmm. Maybe opaque by design?

[00:03:01] Jason: Opaque is perhaps the best way to describe it, yeah.

[00:03:04] Dmitri: so you mentioned you're, currently on the publishing side, but it doesn't only affect publishing. Can we talk a little bit about, like, what are the... If we're saying, "Hey, revenue recovery is an opportunity to grow the market for music because it's literally, like, money left on the table," what are the revenue streams that w- Where would we be looking just in terms of categories?

[00:03:23] Jason: So to, to start at the very, very, very, very beginning, which I'm sure most people watching this know, but just to level set, right? The two fundamental royalty streams within a recording, you know, when you hit play on Spotify or YouTube or anywhere else, the publishing side and the, the recording itself, right?

And two very different... A fork in the road with two very different royalty streams that represent in very different ways, that require different infrastructure to collect against. you know, depending on where you are in the world, they monetize in different ways. Some light up in some areas and some platforms and some don't.

That's already, like, the level of complexity just at that first fork in the road. So if you think about the royalties that the recording generates versus the composition itself, you can imagine any time music is played, you know, generally both of those fire. Not 100% of the time, ironically, but, uh, generally.

But then there's all these different, implementations of other royalty, uh, royalties wh-where they monetize. Um, think about the record or the, composition itself, something like lyrics or melody when it's used in a cover song, when it's used in UGC. Think about the entire YouTube ecosystem, how a single work can be utilized in multiple derivative ways.

You have the recording itself. You have slowed and reverb and chopped. You have the lyrics and the melody and the composition. That's just within one platform. so You can extrapolate that. There are all of these sources that you have to be aware of. SoundExchange, for those familiar, you know, focus on the digital royalty performance for the recording.

 MLC focused on the mechanical. there's so many nuances to this where if you don't have the education around it and perhaps the tech infrastructure to collect against all of these different royalties, um, you're generally leaving something uncollected. And it starts before that, though. A really important part of this conversation is not the type of royalty or the platform or who's collecting it for you, it's about the fundamental information and infrastructure just to be able to do this at all.

[00:05:38] Dmitri: Hmm.

[00:05:38] Jason: You know, we-- uh, you've often spoken about this, um, metadata, right? Keeping your house in order is where this really begins. understanding the information you need to capture as early as possible to enable your publisher to collect, your distributor to distribute, SoundExchange and MLC to, flow royalties through, YouTube to properly identify via content ID against UGC.

And you can't have your metadata in order if you don't have your fundamental splits and business information in order. So you know, this really goes back. if you take money in your bank and you roll it all the way back through sources that collected it for you and to the places that consumption happened that generated the royalty, and you keep going back, you start to hit information, metadata.

You keep going back, you get to the fundamentals of the art itself, and that is Who wrote it, who recorded it, who has a piece of it, who has a business interest in it. And the sooner you can capture that information and agree on it, and the more structured you are, everything else afterwards gets substantially easier.

[00:06:47] Dmitri: Yeah, I mean, just listening to you list out all the places where you could find hidden revenue or unpaid revenue is like a whole college course, right? Maybe a, you know, like it's a high-level college course. It's like-

[00:06:59] Jason: Yeah.

[00:06:59] Dmitri: ... Donald Passman's book, you know? Like, study that for a couple of years and-

[00:07:03] Jason: Yeah

[00:07:03] Dmitri: you might start to, to reveal all those streams. But I think that level of complexity, speaks to, how hard it is to, find that money, 'cause there's so many different streams that are representing different rights within a song or music, a recording, et cetera. and, and I think that's one of the reasons that I selected it as one of the eight multipliers for helping to increase revenue using technology.

 Real quick, we don't have to spend a ton of time on this, but why is this such a hot topic? Is there something about the industry's past that led us here? I mean, we t- I, I mentioned the opacity. Has that been intentional? Or w- why is it so hotly discussed, let's say?

[00:07:41] Jason: You know, we, thought a lot about this.

I, I would say, like, Willard, when founding Kobalt, thought a lot about this, and now us launching and growing Kosign think a lot about this. How can we do this differently, and why do we have to? Why is there a need to be transparent and effective and efficient and increase speed to revenue, and all of the, the problems, why do we have to untangle those?

And it comes down to two fundamental things. structural legacy, which is what I was speaking about a minute ago, this idea that the machine was built for essentially a 20th century model. You create a physical product, you send it around the world, it gets purchased, money comes back, radio for promotion, uh, you know, TV perhaps.

A few channels that control most of the royalty streams. And now, although all those things are still viable and do generate revenue for us, they're not the dominant source, right? And it's, the dominant source is a global interconnected set of ones and zeros, you know, at billions of lines a second. So the structure and the fundamental pipes, although they're being upgraded daily anywhere you look, they're still set in a lot of ways.

Um, you know, I'm here in LA. For those in LA, you saw that water main break last month that flooded West Hollywood 'cause it was a 100-year-old pipe. It's kind of the same idea. We have lots of new infrastructure in LA, but there's still 100-year-old water pipes that really, like, when they break, the city stops.

And there's a version of that that happens with royalty collection. The other is incentives, right? Incentives never really pushed towards transparency, right? And it's not, I'm not trying to be conspiratorial. It's, it's again, it's based on structure. As long as the money comes to you and your responsibility is to figure out where it goes next, and you take your piece for the work you put in, and you pass it on, you've done your job.

And that works in a very simple machine. But as the machine gets more and more complicated with more and more players in the center that things pass through, that gets more and more complicated and problems arise. This is where data matching becomes an issue or different technology, different infrastructure that you have to re-match data or transform information to be able to pass it on to the next.

Or one company's using APIs, the next has moved on to an MCP, the other one is still dropping spreadsheets onto an FTP server. So you just have this soup of legacy technology and then evolving technology that doesn't necessarily match up, and then the incentivization isn't really around precision, right?

It was more about just as long as what came to you left in the agreed-upon terms, you did your job. And it was really no one's job to fix it, right?

[00:10:47] Dmitri: Mm.

[00:10:47] Jason: And this is again, where I think modern companies are raising their hands and saying, "Actually, it's everyone's job to fix this. Here's the piece we're going to fix."

And when you have enough of those lined up and connected, you suddenly get a lot of, of efficiency here.

[00:11:02] Dmitri: I love that you're saying that because it really ties into the thesis that I've put in this Rising Tide series about the role that technology plays to be an additive optimizing for revenue as opposed to purely being, disruptive or possibly even performing arbitrage, which I think may relate to some of the opacity that's been there.

real quickly, how big of a problem is revenue recovery for the industry?

[00:11:25] Jason: billions of dollars uncollected or under-collected. I'd say that's a massive problem, right? I mean, our industry sits in the billions of dollars, and a meaningful percentage of that is suffering from this in some way. There's a few different buckets.

There's money that's collected that's misallocated, and that's, you know, could be a data matching issue, it could be a updates and just basic hygiene and maintenance of, oh, that's no longer the repertoire owner. That's no longer who should be paid. Something's in conflict, and it just goes to the improper old place.

There's a long list of very gnarly reasons things can be collected but misallocated. there's money that's collected but sort of stuck, right? So it's not misallocated, it just sits, and it's for a lot of the same reasons. you know, often it's just incomplete information. There's a real famous 99.9% problem in this business where if you have three parties and they have equal share, it adds up to 99.9, and the system needs it to add up to 100 or no one gets paid.

You see just random things like that. I could give you a list of 100 of those examples where things just get stuck. And then One that is near and dear to my heart, 'cause this is one of the things that I focus on, and that's money that's simply never claimed because the repertoire owner, the rights holder either doesn't know it exists, they don't know how to collect it, they don't even understand the basic business that they're in sometimes of where money comes from.

You know, as I mentioned at the beginning, a lot of this you have to go chase. There are some royalty streams that come to you. For example, you release your, your recorded music through a distributor, the distributor sends you a check. They bring it to you essentially by virtue of you using them to get your music to the world.

Publishing is the opposite. Publishing, you literally have to go out and claim it and get it. It doesn't just come to you by virtue of the right existing. So those are the buckets that create this problem. So if you think about how much money is in each of those buckets, and you're talking billions of dollars that either is uncollected, under-collected, or misdistributed.

Uh, it's, it's a huge issue for this business.

[00:13:44] Dmitri: Yeah. So if you're advising... Like, let's... We, we've gone top level. We've talked about the problem overall, what the revenue streams are, some of the categories, why this exists. If you're talking to a songwriter or advising a recording artist or a small label, where would you first be looking for missing revenue?

What would you tell them, to be on the lookout for?

[00:14:05] Jason: Sure. I'll go back to a few things I said before just so it's all connected. make sure as early as possible you understand the rights that you control for your works. it's very easy if you are the writer and the artist and you do this all yourself.

Oh, great, you have 100%, problem solved. But in the modern world, and especially in a lot of modern genres where you have multiple writers, multiple producers, investors, fan funding, you know, all of these different ways to get art made Who has a piece of the royalty streams isn't always clear, and every day that goes by, it gets less clear, right?

Verbal agreements uh, aren't worth much. get it on paper. So that's step one is ensure you understand the business you're in and the royalties that you have rights to. from there, it's again getting the house in order, get this down in, format that the industry needs, you know, your distributor, your publisher, however you're, you're collecting your royalties.

So that's the table stakes. Without any of that, you can't do anything else. But then the real answer to the question is then what? registration completeness is the goal here. So understand the different, sources you need to register with in order to collect against all of the territories you might be monetizing in So we're talking about a PRO to collect your performance royalties on your publishing.

MLC to collect your mechanicals, right? It's very easy to register with both of these, and you have as many PROs. choose one based on the nature of your business. MLC, very straightforward to register. SoundExchange, ensuring, you know, you register with them to collect against digital royalties. I worked at Pandora a, a while back, and we were, uh, DMCA licensed, paid into SoundExchange.

Uh, a very, very healthy amount of the money that went in there came from us, and many times I had artists calling me angrily saying, like, "I never licensed my music to you," or "Where's... You know, you never paid me." And the answer was always the same. "Oh," click, click, click, click, type, type, type. "Oh, go to SoundExchange and register because based on what I can see from the amount of times you've...

You know, your consumption levels with us, you are owed 25,000, 75,000, $250,000." and it's, it's funny, I never got the thank you call after they went and collected the money. I just got the angry call because they didn't understand. They did not have registration completeness, and these are fundamental places.

You know, like you said at the beginning, get The Passman book and, you know, that gives you the map amongst many other sources. So those are three examples. There's a few others, depending on the complexity of your organization and your, enterprise. But just registering the fundamentals, PRO for publishing, MLC for mechanicals, SoundExchange for the digital, that gets you so far down the road, and then as your business scales, there's other areas.

Uh, I mentioned YouTube and Content ID. That's another one that the more information that you can provide into that system, songwriter splits, ISWCs, ISRCs, you know, correct spellings, just basic things, you know, that can, um, ensure, UGC is linked up, covers, sync usage, things like that. and then international, that gets a bit more complicated.

Fortunately, if you do all the prior steps, like a PRO registration, international often flows through to you. So someone like ASCAP or BMI, they have reciprocal agreements with international collection societies, which will ensure that money will get to you. There's ways to shortcut that and reduce time and, money taken out by the people in the middle.

But at bare minimum, ensure you're collecting it. You can optimize it later, but, you know, like almost everything comes back to that. Understand the fundamental royalty streams, right? Those three in particular, and ensure you are set up so at least those are flowing, and then everything from there just becomes about better collections, faster collections, more accurate collections

[00:18:17] Dmitri: Wow, that's so much information.

Um, and I know I asked you, you know? Like, you're specifically breaking it down. There is a level of complexity where if you're gonna follow the money and recover the revenue or even just collect it from the beginning, you have to know about all these things. You have to know, uh, you know, all the different types of revenue streams and the different organizations, platforms, nonprofits, agencies that are in place to make sure this stuff gets paid out.

 but I got a crazy question for you, and, uh, I hope it doesn't put you off. Is this a distraction for most independent artists? I mean, shouldn't they be focused on getting more people to listen to their music, to buy tickets to their shows, to improving their craft, li- doing licensing for sync, to get, you know, thousand-dollar checks instead of pennies, rather than worrying about collecting missing revenue?

And, and I tell you, you know, I have this 17-year-old kid that I refer to on the podcast, my kid, who's in a band, and I'm like, they're... They just went to a studio Um, they don't, they haven't recorded their splits. I'm like, "You guys." So I'm gonna try to talk to the rest of the band and, and explain everything that you just said.

I'm thinking about these things like, yeah, register at SoundExchange, the MLC. They haven't even distributed the EP yet, but I'm like, "As soon as you do, all these things need to be in place because of..." And they're like, "Well, we're doing this for the local scene, you know? Like, we just want this for our fans.

We're not expecting to make any money off of it." And I'm like, "Yeah, but what if something goes viral on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube or something? And you, you... I don't want you guys to have a fight later about it , you know?"

[00:19:50] Jason: Yeah.

[00:19:50] Dmitri: I mean- But, but, but like if they're not expecting to sell anything, it seems like-

[00:19:54] Jason: Yeah

[00:19:54] Dmitri: a bit of a distraction, right? They're just like, "I'm just trying to be a musician here."

[00:19:59] Jason: Yeah. You know, artists never tend to th- well, not never, but many artists don't think about this until there's a reason to think about it. To your, the examples you gave, a viral hit, a sync placement, interest from A&R and now, like, they're, the machine is working for them.

But if that's the moment that you're thinking about things, it's certainly not too late, but it's later than ideal, right? There's a lot of royalty streams... I'll, I'll come back and answer the actual question in a second- ... but this is a really important side point. , A lot of royalty streams collect and sit, as we talked about earlier, and you have a window to collect them, right?

Depending on the, the nature of the platform, the royalty stream, it might be 18 months, it might be 24 months. Sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter. We see this at Kosign all the time, where someone comes to us and says, "I've never had a publishing administrator, and I've had this work out in the marketplace for 18 months.

It's been streaming. It's finally taken flight. I, I wanna make sure." And we say, "Look, we will aggressively chase back claims for you, and the odds are we can scoop up a lot of that money. But some of it might be gone." And gone typically means distributed to other companies and writers based on market share.

It's the black box you often hear about, this idea anything that can't be distributed after a set amount of time goes into the black box. in periodic moments, that's distributed based on market share, which typically, if you're an independent artist and your royalties are being distributed by market share and it's going up to the larger artists and companies, you're probably not thrilled about that.

Not only the fact that it's not coming to you, but where it's going. Um, and you know, this is... And it's part of the way the system works. I mean, it, it's better than that money just dissolving. But what's even better than that is getting ahead of this and so one doesn't have to chase the money, but instead your registrations are in place when the consumption happens, when those royalties hit, because then there is no question as to w- that it goes to the rightful place.

So having said all that- Uh, which is, in, in summary, register as soon as possible. Even if you're not trying to sell it, even if you don't think it's going to be a hit, just get the infrastructure in place. So then the question is, should I be worried about this, registrations, metadata, spreadsheets, or should I be creating art?

And I love this question. It's, uh... I, I've answered this 100 different ways for the past 25 years. It's not either/or. It's about sequencing.

[00:22:30] Dmitri: Hmm.

[00:22:30] Jason: It's about understanding when to focus where. So in the early days, create. Create art. Express yourself. Align every atom in your body to put art into the universe.

I love that. but when you have something that you then want to really put out into the world and see where it takes you, shift to fundamental setup, maintenance, registration, because often it's a one-time effort. It's not as if you're suddenly going from creator to accountant, and that's all you do for the foreseeable future.

A lot of these things are one time. You set it up, you ensure everything is accurate, and then occasionally there's some maintenance to ensure it's up to date and it's flowing. But it's not an ongoing distraction, right? and you'll find that an hour spent on this might be the most money per hour you'll ever make in your career.

[00:23:30] Dmitri: Wow.

[00:23:30] Jason: If you wanna think about it purely from the, the revenue perspective and the royalty perspective. So the asterisk to all this is I understand that even with that simplicity and the one-time setup for a lot of these things and the importance, some creatives open up a form and are asked for an ISRC and just it does not compute.

The left brain, right brain is not wired that way, and maybe that's what makes them incredible creators, so I'm not, you know, I'm not here to critique that. If that's the case, find someone you trust who can understand this and have them do it, right? But the fundamental point here is someone has to do it, and in the early days, it's likely to be the same person, the creator and the person running the enterprise.

But going back to that fundamental point It's not either/or, right? It's just the right sequence at the right time, and then you get back to creating.

[00:24:28] Dmitri: I love it. Super, super helpful. So we've kind of set out this definition of what we mean by revenue recovery, all the revenue streams. We've talked about why it's such a hot topic, where the challenges are, how big of a problem it is, gotten into what this means for when the rubber hits the road for a songwriter or recording artist, for an independent artist, et cetera, where they should be looking, but really setting it up properly.

But the big theme with Music Tectonics and the Rising Tide has to do with these technology platforms and categories that help to increase the market overall, and we're saying revenue recovery is one of those categories. But I'm curious, Jason, what kinds of tech or platforms have you seen out there that help songwriters and composers or producers or maybe recording and performing artists to recover missing revenue?

Let's talk about the tech and the platforms that are out there.

[00:25:21] Jason: Sure.

So there's hundreds of companies at this point that cater to different aspects of this, and finding the right one for your situation takes homework. And so instead of just a list of companies, uh, what I like to focus on is categories, which I think is a good map. And then, you know, it just takes the, the research and homework to determine within those categories which is the right company based on the business model and the cost and then where it fits.

 but before I go into categories, let's talk about the trend that's happening around technology to solve the issues around royalty collection. And that's Self-service, transparency, and control are the fundamental trends that are happening here, right? Self-service, this idea that the infrastructure and the technology has evolved to the point and it's sophisticated enough, and there's enough people thinking about these problems where the power to impact this is now in the hands of the creators should they choose to use it.

And most platforms are enabling as much of the process, on the front end where the artist can impact it, they can see it, they understand it, versus some random company somewhere far away that you don't even quite know how they operate and they're doing all the work on your behalf and you just have to hope that it's going to plan and that the, you know, the, the economics are as described.

So self-service is really a major piece of this and it's given DIY artists, developing artists, even fully established career independent artists and even some major label artists the ability to control their own destiny. transparency, you know, everything is available now. Everything is a data point.

Opacity is the enemy. it's inexcusable at this point to not provide this information to allow clients, if you're the company, if you're the tech, to understand what's happening with their royalties, with their performance, because it's very accessible and very easy. And then control, the ability to really determine which pieces you need, how you want your intellectual property to be utilized, and then the parameters of the business terms that you agree to, right?

It's a wildly different playing field than it used to be where none of those things existed. Self-service, you were reliant on others. Transparency, everything was opaque. Control, you basically signed over control to someone or a business that you hoped acted on your best behalf. Um, this is fundamentally why Cosign exists.

It's why Kobalt exists. Kosign-- The, the fundamentals of Kosign and why it launched was we have 25 years of Kobalt infrastructure, direct deals, technology, global PRO access through AMRA, and the idea was we could put a platform around all of that infrastructure that allows independent and developing artists to have the ability to self-serve, to have transparency and control with a world-class publishing administration suite that was only available prior to that to larger artists that did, you know, formal publishing deals.

So this is-- These three things are near and dear to my heart because this is why Kosign exists So if you think about those trends and then you look across the landscape, there's a lot of categories of businesses that are working towards this and trying to put the control into the artist's hands, give them transparency.

Some of the ones I already mentioned, places like MLC and SoundExchange, critical tech platforms that do a lot of the work for you and they exist to pass this through. There's a lot of platforms out there that will get your house in order. They will handle aggregation of your metadata, ensuring it's in the right formats, ensuring comprehensiveness, that all of the ownership information is there so that when it's transmitted to your DSP to get your music streaming, transmitted to your PRO to ensure collections of your performance, that you're not going to get into these issues around matching and misallocation of funds.

 There's other platforms that are incredibly valuable in this process, royalty platforms, and either real-time or near real-time royalty visibility. There's longstanding players that are more enterprise grade that if you're a major label or a major publisher, you're using. But there's a lot of startups that are focused on simply export CSVs from your distributor and your publishing admin and any other sources, upload them, and we'll make sense of them for you.

So you're not looking at multiple platforms trying to understand your nascent enterprise, but instead, we'll simply process those and show you your business health. that was unavailable up until recently, and thanks to this category of new tech platforms. you know, I mentioned capturing information early.

One of the categories in tech, platforms I love, there's a few, that are focused on capturing splits and fundamental agreements as early as possible, including in the recording studio, right? So as soon as something is laid to tape, if you already understand and you have an agreement on the go-forward ownership of that intellectual property, capture it and document it at the scene of the crime.

Like, how cool is that where you never have to worry about this again? A few more categories. Uh, again, it's-- this is why it's so complicated, right? There's all of these things one might need, might not need. administration platforms where Kosign fits in. There's others out there as well that simply do this work for you or some pieces of this work.

 AI-assisted tools, we're seeing a lot of those come up where, for example, AI-- there's a lot of interesting work happening around, using AI and agentic solutions to go out and look at your registration health and identify, areas where some of these organizations I've mentioned are missing information or have conflicts that you might not even know exist.

 so this idea of proactive detection, right? Flagging that there's a money problem before you realize that the money hasn't arrived. so there's all these categories beyond the, the categories that we've-- that are sort of established now. Your distributor, perhaps a marketing tool, your social management, your paid media management.

All of those are now basic infrastructure that are no longer like the new thing. And we're-- I would even put things like super fan and community. A lot of that, they are established, they are working, people understand where those fit. But this whole new category of emerging tools around metadata, completion, registration completion, resolution of conflict, all of those things, they don't just help you find money, that you may have lost, but they stop those problems from occurring in the first place.

[00:32:10] Dmitri: Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

[00:32:10] Jason: And if you can implement the right tech stack there, then, you know, you can really get ahead of these things. And I'll leave it at one of my favorite quotes. It's attributed to Einstein, who knows, you know, at this point. But the goal is to make this as simple as possible, but no simpler Right?

Minimum viable product, right? Like, we, you know, every category I just went through, you might be thinking, "Wow, do I need that? I need that, I need that. How do I do this? How..." You might not need all this. The idea is figure out the state of your current enterprise, what your business looks like, what your royalty streams look like, and then find the minimum possible combination of these tools, and that's what you should focus on.

But nothing simpler. Don't miss something.

[00:32:55] Dmitri: Amazing. Jason, this has been so helpful. I feel like you really have broken it down. And I, and for possibly the first time in my s- Rising Tide series, I've asked a question and gotten the answer the way that I was hoping to get it. Because, you know, in some of the earlier episodes, I'd ask a question like, "Why is the music industry so small?"

And somebody might say, "Well, it's not that small." I'm like, "Wait, no, it's too small. It's smaller than gaming and sports." Or I'd ask the question of, "Well, what comes after streaming?" And the answer might be, "Well, streaming's gonna keep happening. Other things are gonna come with it." And I was like, "Oh, okay." But in this case, we identified one of our categories as revenue recovery, and you broke it down for us and got from top level to kinda tactical, to very specific platforms.

It was super valuable. If folks listening want to talk to Jason, you're gonna be at the Music Tectonics conference. We're working on a panel that you'll be a part of called Closing the Royalty Collection Gap or something along the lines. I love that you're bringing that conversation to Tectonics, because I've been talking about let's grow the market, and you're talking about let's grow the market, but let's also make sure certain players within it are getting their share, you know?

There's this idea, we say rising tide lifts all boats, and you're like, "Rising tide, uneven boats? Let's fix some of those problems, too" Which I, I think-

[00:34:11] Jason: Yeah

[00:34:11] Dmitri: ... is a perfect way to think about it. I'm really excited to have you there. Jason, thanks for coming onto the podcast and for being a partner with Music Tectonics.

This is awesome.

[00:34:21] Jason: A pleasure as always. Thank you for having me.

Jeff Ponchick

[00:00:00] Dmitri: I am here with Jeff Ponchick, co-founder and CEO of Mogul. Hey, Jeff. How's it going?

[00:00:07] Jeff: It's going great. How are you? Thank you for having me.

[00:00:09] Dmitri: Doing great. Yeah, great to have you. What is Mogul and how does it relate to this topic we have of revenue recovery?

[00:00:15] Jeff: Sure. I would say with Mogul, revenue recovery is the name of the game.

 so every day in our team meeting we say, "Let's make artists money. Let's find them money." And the way that we do that is we have built the rocket money of the music industry. So you create a Mogul account, you give us, access to your digital distributor, your publisher, your performing rights organization, you link them into Mogul, and then we centralize all your sound recording and publishing data in one view, which shockingly, that hasn't really existed for people in an affordable way until now.

And then once we have that royalty centralization around all of your data, we help you find all your missing registrations, royalties across all rights types, and then work with you to repair those issues with your existing partners

[00:01:02] Dmitri: Geez, we literally just had this conversation with Jason from Kosign about all these different revenue streams and how you keep track of it, and you're like, "Uh, we do that."

[00:01:11] Jeff: Exactly. Yep.

[00:01:12] Dmitri: Yeah

[00:01:12] Jeff: There's a... Yeah. It's, you know, in, in the music industry, there are some companies that will do one or two different rights. but at the end of the day, most artists w- that we've found have an average of, like, seven to 10 different logins to different companies, right? And yeah, there's not really anything pulling it all together.

And so while Kosign is a fantastic publishing administrator, right, powered by Cobalt, you know, you still need a performing rights organization, you know, an ASCAP or BMI, you name it. And, you know, that's another thing you have to manage on top of working with Kosign. So, you know, we bring that all together, and we're really platform agnostic.

 we just wanna help people understand what the heck is going on with the companies they choose to work with.

[00:01:52] Dmitri: I'm curious, for the, revenue that you're tracking, the, the ways in which you're trying to bring or make artists some money, how much money's at stake, and, why do we need technology to help us increase those revenue numbers?

[00:02:02] Jeff: Yeah. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, right? and y- this is a, a fun topic 'cause I can very easily go into my tin hat theories about, you know, why this is the case. But what we've identified at Mogul is that for artists who create accounts and connect their performing rights organization or sound exchange and, or their publisher or, you know, you name it, often, in many cases, upwards of 50% of artist catalogs are not registered correctly where they should be, right?

And so it's a huge, it's a huge, I would say, hidden problem, which is artists and their teams are simply not doing the data entry required to even set themself up for the opportunity of getting paid incorrectly. They're just not getting paid at all. And when that happens, when, you know, various societies around the world don't have access to the data on who to pay out to, it gets stuck in escrow, and it builds up, and there's a time limit on these things.

Uh, it takes about... You have about three to five years from the time that a song is released before you can get that back pay. Anything older than that, it's gone. And so, um, it's a huge problem. A ton of slippage happening in the music industry, just because there's so many different things to manage, and the data isn't getting to the places that it needs to be.

[00:03:22] Dmitri: Well, we used to talk about breakage, now we talk about slippage.

[00:03:25] Jeff: Mm. Yeah. I, I think that's the right term, slippage, right? I,

[00:03:29] Dmitri: I, I mean, I think there's a lot of metaphors we could use for it, so.

[00:03:32] Jeff: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:32] Dmitri: There's nothing, there's nothing wrong with that term. I just think it's, it's... You know, breakage was, like, physical product actually getting broken.

[00:03:39] Jeff: Mm.

[00:03:39] Dmitri: And now it's sort of like slippage is a little broader because it's... It could be things aren't registered correctly. It could be that splits aren't correct. It could be, that someone's just not paying it out 'cause nobody's collected it, or it could be there's, you know, a rights, dispute. There could be so many things, and I think slippage is, uh, probably the most polite word you can use-

[00:03:57] Jeff: Yes

[00:03:57] Dmitri: for all those categories.

[00:03:58] Jeff: Slipping around, yeah.

[00:04:00] Dmitri: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you kind of mentioned that Mogul kind of reduces some of the data entry or the tracking, that sort of thing. what is the sauce? People like to say secret sauce. I don't know if it's secret, but what is the sauce that Mogul gives operators in the music industry, and who's it for exactly?

[00:04:17] Jeff: Sure. So Mogul is primarily for, we're direct with musicians and in many cases music managers. Uh, we also work with royalty professionals who may oversee, you know, a lot of different artists' royalties and registrations. And the secret sauce, fantastic question, is we built, if you're familiar with the fintech platform Plaid, we built the Plaid of the music industry.

So... And we're one of the only companies that offers this. So when you create a Mogul account, you give us your username and password to the companies that pay you, and we add ourselves as a guest user. So Mogul is sort of a guest user across thousands of different artists' various royalty portals. And so when you think about it, when you go to release a new song, right, you might need to go to Kosign, you might need to go to SoundExchange, you might need to go to, you know, a number of other, companies and platforms which pay you.

 we have our own flow where you can just give us the split details once, and instead of having to log into five different things and go through different custom forms of data entry, you just do it once and it's done. And I think with Mogul, you know, we are... I believe we, we actually timed it. We're something like six to seven times faster, when it comes to actually, like, when you release a new song and just getting it registered everywhere it should be.

So we save people a ton of time by doing that. And then we also back audit the catalog, right? So once we have all of your statement data from all the companies that pay you and we can see what you have been paid out on, the lack of what... You know, there's a correct way for the royalties to flow. we can also see what you haven't been paid out on.

And so that is, you know, can take a lot of time to figure out, you know, if you have a, especially a large catalog, what hasn't been paid out on correctly. And so, you know, you sort of get this registrations audit. I would say 99% of folks, I would say use us specifically for that. and we just say, "Hey, we're not seeing the featured artist share in neighboring rights.

Looks like we need to add these 10 things to your SoundExchange account," and we do that cleanup for you. So for us, I would say our secret sauce is we've come up with a somewhat faster, more elegant way of getting the data we need to provide that audit and then register your new music in a faster, more user-friendly way.

[00:06:23] Dmitri: Got it. And you said that artists are a primary, user, but you also said something like, people who are managing royalties for a lot of artists. Is that what you said?

[00:06:31] Jeff: Yeah.

[00:06:31] Dmitri: Do you mean publishers or publishing administrators, or who is that?

[00:06:34] Jeff: Yeah. So Mogul isn't specifically for publishing administrators or labels yet, although we do have folks who do sign up.

They see value in the sort of aggregated data view across, you know, the different royalty types that they're collecting on those types of things. when I say royalty professionals, I'm more referring to managers, also business managers, right? So folks who are responsible for the finances around larger acts.

So, and then, yeah, in some cases we work directly with some songwriters and producers, too.

[00:07:05] Dmitri: Got it. Okay. So some of these are self-administered artists who are managing their own publishing, and some of them are managers, business managers, et cetera. And obviously, I'm gonna ask you, like, if you had one tip for these people, what would it be?

The first tip, obviously, is to sign up for Mogul.

[00:07:22] Jeff: Yeah.

[00:07:22] Dmitri: But is there anything else you could offer up as sort of like, something complementary to that? What's the one tip you would give them?

[00:07:29] Jeff: The tip is this: I think that any time an artist or a team member of an artist looks at the business, you're gonna make more money, or hopefully you're gonna make more money.

And I think that a lot of people in the music industry look at the royalties and registrations and because it's complex, there's a lot of... A big gap of education around how it works, right? The rules in the US around certain things are different than ex-US, and it's very complicated, that a lot of people are sort of afraid to look at it.

And so a big problem that we're trying to solve is just how do we sort of like dispel the myths around what's right and what isn't and, yeah, just give people a place that just gives them the answers to what they need to do. So my advice to musicians, managers would be don't be afraid of it.

 and you know, this is a part of the job and, obviously give Mogul a try. we try and make it as easy as we can for folks. But yeah, I think my advice would essentially be, you know, the more time you spend looking at the business, the more money you're gonna make

[00:08:28] Dmitri: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So for these artists or artist team members that are managing the royalties, managers or business managers, et cetera, there must be some that are, like, the ideal user, customer of Mogul. who would you say in that category would most benefit from reaching out to you at Mogul? is there a certain time in a career?

Is there a certain size of a- artist? certain roles within the team, et cetera? who's the ones that benefit most?

[00:08:55] Jeff: Yeah. So I would say at Mogul, I would say our market for sort of the at-scale product is certainly probably anybody who makes m- about 500 to 1,000 bucks a year minimum, maybe.

That's sort of when you're at the point where, you know, a low price subscription might make sense to try and optimize your royalties, and we can cover our costs and it makes sense. Now, That's not to say that, you know, there are some artists who just see value in, you know, getting organized so when their song does take off, hopefully in the future, you know, they're covered.

Um, so we work with all artists and managers of all sizes, but I would say that's probably where we're seeing folks seeing the most value. And then, yeah, for larger organizations, management companies, business management companies, you know, we've just seen several instances in which, you know, you'll have a company that might have a small royalty team or a singular royalty person and, you know, when you're managing...

You know, if you go off of what I said earlier, you know, every artist is, let's say, 7 to 10 logins to things they've had on a portion of the royalties. If you multiply that by 50 or 100 artists, that's really difficult for one person. And so yeah, we love speaking with, you know, companies and enterprises that, you know, are trying to take stock and understand the royalty picture across their entire roster of clients.

 and, you know, you can reach out to me about that, and we're happy to chat.

[00:10:15] Dmitri: Awesome. Amazing. Jeff Ponchik, Mogul CEO, thanks for telling us about Mogul. It's great to have you on here. I guess people can go to usemogul.com. That's the spot, right?

[00:10:25] Jeff: That's it. Yep. And thank you for having me.

[00:10:27] Dmitri: Amazing. Look f- yeah, look forward to seeing you at Music Tectonics in October.

Thanks, Jeff.

[00:10:31] Jeff: See you there.

Rob Brown

[00:00:00] Dmitri: I'm here with Rob Brown, chief revenue officer at mprs. How you doing, Rob?

[00:00:05] Rob: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Dmitri.

[00:00:07] Dmitri: Yeah, great to have you. I'm really excited to talk to you. We're trying to come up with some examples whenever we talk about, one of the revenue multipliers in tech, and we've been talking about revenue recovery.

What is mprs, and how does it relate to our topic of revenue recovery?

[00:00:22] Rob: So mprs is a administration company that focuses solely on master point royalties. So those are the, royalties that an artist will normally give to a producer, mixer, engineer, and in some cases, a top-line songwriter, , across all of the products that they're working on.

So for a producer, that can mean that they have multiple streams of income coming from multiple labels representing multiple artists. in terms of revenue recovery, the issue that we come across is the fact that because it's such a fraction of a fraction, lots of details can get lost, and in that way, income can get lost.

So we focus on recovering it

[00:01:07] Dmitri: Wow, that's so interesting, to think about because you're right, the producers are doing maybe a, a little bit or a lot, but across a lot of different songs, right? And a, a lot of different productions. And so I could see where it would be hard to keep track of everything.

[00:01:19] Rob: Absolutely. I think, I think if you look at it in comparison with publishing, a producer will have one, publishing company, and that company will administer everything that they work across. Whereas with points, because they're working with artists across multiple labels, until mprs, there wasn't really a company to be able to keep a track of all of the projects that they're working across and making sure that everything is being paid through as, intended.

[00:01:48] Dmitri: Yeah. Yeah. I'm already seeing some, some picture, and I've heard, you know, that sometimes rights will kind of get, or royalties will get locked up because there's three artists all at 33.33%, and since that last .01% hasn't been assigned, which could be a producer for all we know, no money gets released as well , so it actually can help their collaborators as well.

[00:02:12] Rob: Oh, absolutely. there's lots of reasons why producers, don't get paid on their production points. Sometimes it's to do with other parties related to the project itself. What we find the most, though, is hiccups in the actual paperwork. So it can be something as simple as the agreement not being fully countersigned, or the letter of direction to the label, not being given to the label, or it could just be a, something being missed from the registration by the label's side, and everything in between

[00:02:47] Dmitri: Got it.

So we talked a little about the importance of it. How much money is at stake and how do you use technology to help increase those revenue numbers?

[00:02:56] Rob: good question. I think, well, firstly, there's a lot of money at stake. I was listening to your podcast a little while ago, and I think it was Jade who had made the analogy of, the music industry being a similar size to Starbucks and, publishing kind of being akin to the food.

So I think if you think about the rest, so, the music recording side being the drink, mprs is kind of like the lid on top of each cup. So, you know, we are a fraction of the kind of very significant portion of the industry. It's just that it's something that you don't necessarily think about. so that's why there is quite a lot at stake.

 in terms of how we use technology, we focus on looking at the details. So our technology uses the statements that our clients receive from the labels alongside the contract information that we pull on behalf of our clients and to see-- and also the, market data available to us to make sure that what's being paid out is correct based on streaming numbers, but also correct based on the terms that our clients has agreed to.

[00:04:10] Dmitri: Got it. What's the magic that mprs gives producers? I'm curious about, like, the secret sauce or, you know, yeah, how, how it's, how it's special and, and gives them superpowers.

[00:04:22] Rob: our secret sauce superpowers, would be transparency, I think predominantly. Um, I think similar to Jason at Kosign and Kobalt, our focus is about making sure that our clients have a clear picture as to where their money is, when it's coming, and what the reasons are for it maybe not arriving just yet.

 this particular area of the industry, because of how fractionalized it is, it's very difficult for someone to look at in the same way as they would their other music assets. And so through our technology, so through our portal, for example, our clients are able to see their entire points discography, on one page as one total sum.

That allows them to see how they want to move with their catalog going forward and what other projects they might wanna do and which direction they might wanna take it.

[00:05:14] Dmitri: Oh, that's pretty cool. Just, like, having it all gathered in one place can give you kind of ideas about where's my focus? Where do I want my focus to be?

How else could I leverage specific about this fractional catalog, basically.

[00:05:27] Rob: Absolutely. I think, the ability to see everything at once and to make decisions based on the whole, just gives more options to our clients. So another example of how we provide optionality is through providing advances.

So we are one of the very few companies that are able to provide advances across this kind of multi-label discography. that's something that gives our clients the ability to maybe take a pause when it comes to other deals that they're thinking about, maybe it's publishing deals or other deals where there's a large advance at stake that they wanna take their time to gain leverage.

 that gives them the ability to have some liquidity and to also kind of make decisions based on something slightly more strategic other than financial.

[00:06:13] Dmitri: That sounds like the technology itself is creating new opportunities by gathering everything together.

[00:06:19] Rob: Absolutely. I guess to the kind of farthest extent of that, this technology and all the data that a client is able to see at once allows them to plan even further into the future in terms of whether they want to sell, this catalog.

 having worked on the acquisition side of things, one of the big factors for sellers in the market or buyers in the market is the clarity of data information. And so when you have an administrator, be it on the publishing side or be it on the mprs side, a buyer can see all of the data in one place and can come up with a multiple that is easy to identify.

And obviously by having an administrator such as mprs, you're ensuring that the multiple that is being provided is of the highest amount.

[00:07:07] Dmitri: Got it. So if you had one tip for producers on this topic of revenue recovery, what would it be?

[00:07:14] Rob: One tip. One, to take it seriously, take your points seriously, as seriously as you do your publishing.

So that means to me, as someone who has a law background, keep all of your contracts, keep everything in a Dropbox or in an email folder or whatever. it is the thing that will allow you to have the most amount of leverage in all of the conversations with, either the labels who should be paying you, or the artists who maybe haven't had all of the documents signed, and also with companies like mprs who can provide optionality in terms of, um, advances and things of that nature

[00:07:52] Dmitri: Nice.

Who would benefit most from reaching out to you at mprs? I mean, you've mentioned producers, so there's obviously producers. I don't know if there's other categories that fit in well with the way that you guys are tracking, revenue and, and royalties, or if there's a particular type of producer, a certain scale they should be at, or certain scenes or genres where they need the most help or anything like that.

[00:08:16] Rob: Good question. I think we're a pretty broad church in terms of who, we apply to. So you touch obviously producers, producers of any genre. Uh, we're, we're not genre-specific. but also mixers. Mixers, probably work on more projects, uh, year to year just purely because of the amount that they can churn through.

 composers. Composers who work on film scores, who receive residuals from production companies, or even people who work on productions for gaming, for games. Um, but also, executives. So music executives who often receive, executive production points when working on albums, so maybe A&R execs, and other people in that space.

But also we have clients who are funds who have also acquired catalogs and are looking to make sure that what they've acquired continues to be collected and any money that is, lost can be easily found and everything in between. But in terms of size, I al- This was actually a conversation I had with someone today.

I think we always recommend anyone getting involved in an administration process as soon as possible. But I think the question as to whether it makes sense is very much dependent upon the client themselves. Like, you have to want your business to be as, neatly managed as possible for it to feel like the right thing to do.

So that can be someone who is just getting a bit of traction through a couple of tracks that's doing really well, all the way through to someone who has a world-renowned catalog, and they're thinking about estate planning. so if it means anything to you and you want your music to be taken, or this portion of your catalog to be taken as seriously as everything else, then we're for you.

[00:10:10] Dmitri: Amazing. Rob, thanks so much for coming and sharing what you're doing at mprs.

[00:10:13] Rob: Thank you very much

Let us know what you think! Find us on LinkedIn, and Instagram, or connect with podcast host Dmitri Vietze on LinkedIn.

The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.