A metadata consultant who reviewed 11 recent client engagements has identified three recurring reasons music catalogs fail to generate royalties: missing registrations, mistaken identity, and conflicting data.
The review covered recording artists, featured performers, songwriters, composers, and small to mid-sized publishing catalogs. Catalog sizes ranged from a handful of works to more than tens of thousands of assets. A twelfth engagement focused on operational efficiency rather than catalog data.
The consultant noted that the sample is not random: clients typically seek help when something is wrong or when they need systems in place to scale. The findings cannot show how often these problems go unnoticed because only cases brought for review were examined.
Three failure categories#
- Missing: the most common and easiest to fix. More than half of the catalogs had incomplete registrations and claims, sometimes with no registration at all with a key entity.
- Mistaken: the hardest to see. A valid identifier attached to the wrong party can pass automated validation checks and go unnoticed until human review.
- Conflicting: no party may be wrong, but resolving the conflict requires research.
The consultant said these categories do not change with scale. Economies of scale bring different challenges, as teams may only be able to focus on the highest revenue earners. A label can still have missing revenue channels, and a publisher can inherit a catalog with partial claims at the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC).
Missing registrations block payment#
Clean documentation alone does not trigger payment. The catalogs themselves were generally in good shape from a data perspective, with clean distribution and International Standard Recording Codes (ISRCs) in place. The issue came from key entities being completely overlooked, most often the MLC or the Rights Owner side of SoundExchange.
Four catalogs had no MLC account at all, and nearly all the others had incomplete MLC records. The consultant advises independent songwriters to check their MLC account or set one up if it does not exist.
Mistaken identity is harder to detect#
A missing registration is a blank that is easy to spot in an audit. A registration attached to the wrong party does not announce itself. It may appear complete and legitimate, and it can pass automated validation checks built into industry systems.
In one case, an artist’s entire catalog appeared to belong to someone else because a database cross-referenced his discography with another artist who shares the same name. In another, a songwriter’s works registered with a performance rights organization (PRO) were crossed with another songwriter of the same name, likely because a registration used the wrong Interested Parties Information (IPI) number.
Signals of mistaken identity include statement details that do not match, a credit that links to the wrong person, or unexpected browser search results. The consultant said resolving the songwriter case is still in progress and may take months.
