Any time a song is recorded, there are two separate copyrights that exist:
Example: The song “I Will Always Love You” was written by Dolly Parton, but there is a famous version recorded by Whitney Houston.
Whitney Houston’s label, Arista, controls rights to the master recording. Dolly Parton controls rights to the composition.
Any time there is a purchase (physical CD, or download) or an ON DEMAND STREAM of the song from a service like Spotify or Napster, both the label AND the songwriter need to be paid. The money paid to the songwriter is called a mechanical royalty.
In the US for On Demand Streams (i.e Spotify, Napster etc), it is the responsibility of the store to administer payments of mechanical royalties to the individual songwriters. Problem is, these stores have not invested in an infrastructure to properly administer these payments. Instead, the majority of them hire third party services to do the administration for them. The problem is, these hired services are struggling to pay accurately (we estimate they have a 65-80% total match rate, meaning 20-35% of royalties are unpaid) and on time (the law states that these stores must pay once a month, but most of them pay less than once per quarter).
This is where Audiam comes in - Audiam’s Digital Rights Administration service goes out and gets you the money that is owed to you for on demand streams and other digital uses of your music.
It is important to note that we are NOT a publishing administrator - rather, we work on behalf of publishing administrators or self-published songwriters to deal with this one particular sector of music publishing.