Why Can't Songtrust Just Do Their Job?
Three Strikes and You're Out
After 5 years, I’m leaving Songtrust, my music publishing administrator, because they’re not doing their job. I’ll explain in a minute.
What is a music publishing administrator?
If you stream music on a service like Spotify, there’s a number of different royalties that get calculated and sent to various places.
The main royalty is for listening to the song (the sound recording), and that royalty is sent to the distributor. In my case, that’s a company like DistroKid, CDBaby, Soundrop, Routenote, and many others, and they turn around and pay me based on our agreement. For an artist signed to a record label, the money goes to the record label and the artist is paid based on their contract.
In the context of listening to music on Spotify, there are two smaller royalties that are paid out - mechanical royalties and publishing royalties. I’m not going to try to explain the complexities of these because we’d be here all day, but these smaller royalties are paid out to various “collection societies” and “performance rights organizations” (PRO) around the world - something like 50 or 60 companies based on geography.
There are other royalties for radio and licensing, but these are out of scope for this discussion as they’re not collected by a publishing administrator like Songtrust.
What Songtrust did, at least in 2019 when I joined them, was give me a place where I can enter the titles of the recordings I’ve distributed so this data can be sent to the 50 or 60 companies around the world. So if somebody streams my music in England, then mechanical royalties generated there will go into a database in the MCPS. Or in Indonesia, mechanical royalties go to WAMI. And so on.
Every so often, reports are generated and money is shuffled around the world. MCPS and WAMI look at the Mark Rushton numbers and can see that Songtrust is the publishing administrator, and so that money is sent to Songtrust. 15% deducted by Songtrust for their work and I get paid every quarter.
Because of my recent deal with an exclusive library, I had to contact Songtrust about it. I opened a ticket and never heard back.
Also, Songtrust said they sent my bank account money on March 29th and said it was delivered on April 4th, but the money never arrived. My bank says nothing was sent. My banking information is correct with Songtrust. I opened a ticket and never heard back.
I made sure my email was working. Yes, it’s working. Nothing in the spam filter.
I looked around online. Lots of recent negative reviews at Trust Pilot. And the BBB. And Facebook. And Reddit.
I decided to check my account at ASCAP to see when the last time recordings were registered. After each release, I enter them into Songtrust - it’s part of my process. And while I’ve released 228 recordings in the past year, none of them are in ASCAP. It’s been about 13 months since anything has been sent by Songtrust to ASCAP.
I checked The MLC, which has a public title search. It’s been 9 months since anything was registered there on my behalf by Songtrust.
Let’s recap:
Songtrust, a company I’m contracted with:
Hasn’t registered my songs in over a year.
Says they paid out money, but it hasn’t arrived.
Fails to answer customer support requests in a timely manner.
It’s a bummer because I was a big champion of Songtrust back in 2019 when they got me royalties that would been impossible for me to collect at the time.
Since then, things have seemingly been fine. I had a few customer support questions in 2019 and 2020, but they were always answered quickly and by people with real names (but who no longer work for the company).
Something has changed.
I’m not going to speculate on Songtrust’s problems. They did name a new CEO in the past few weeks, and then their CIO recently died. But that’s no excuse for failing to perform the basic functions of our contract.
I did fill out a cancellation request to remove them as my publishing administrator. I’d take it over, at least in the short term, although it won’t happen overnight. It might be a few months. It’s a bit more work, and I won’t be able to collect every royalty around the world, but I’m not chasing down the last penny. Perhaps it’s time to find a publishing company that still deals in customer service.
Even if Songtrust contacts me, I’m not hanging around. There’s been too much damage. Too much trust has been lost. If you read any of the above links to Trust Pilot, FB, BBB, et al, it’s not just me.
I consider their inaction to be a breach of contract.
One thing I’ll need from Songtrust is a Letter of Relinquishment, a paper saying they’re no longer my publishing administrator.
If I ever receive the Letter of Relinquishment, then I can correct everything at ASCAP and The MLC. It’s a lot of work. I have a lot of titles. But they’re all in my Airtable database, so it’s mostly cut-and-paste. Everybody has Bulk Upload these days.
If I don’t get the Letter of Relinquishment, then I’ll have to hire a lawyer to write a letter to get me The Letter. Let’s try to avoid that, kids.
Why do companies act like this?
I’m not going to blame “the music industry”. The industry is vastly different from 20 years ago. Light years from 50 or 100 years ago.
Companies these days have an aversion to human customer service. The suits see customer service as a cost center rather than a business partner. Anything to cut costs, even if it destroys the company. That’s the mantra of too many MBAs these days.
The tech side of customer service is even worse. The techies hate humanity. These geeks think everything can be replaced with chatbots and “AI”, whatever that is. “Our human customers are the problem.” = Too many of the nerds believe this.
The techies also think tech will just get better and better, as if Moore’s Law somehow equates to an improved world. Some tech has made the world better, but a lot of tech is awful and is simply done for the sake of it being tech - or it’s following some stupid trend.
So, in the end, it’s always humans that ruin the good things that tech provides. There’s lots of ways this can be achieved: cutting corners, bad programming, indifferent analysis, or only having a hammer and thinking everything’s a nail.
Anyway, we’ll see how this plays out. It’s OK to take back some of these tasks.
Years ago, after Sting discovered his manager had stolen millions from him, he supposedly went back to signing all the checks himself. That’s a good plan.
I have new music coming out on May 1st - an album under my name called Memory Tunnel. Pre-save it on Spotify by going here.
Also visit the Mark Rushton Gallery at markrushtongallery.com
Sorry you're having such terrible issues with that administrator. Hoping it gets resolved in your favor shortly!