Sound Exchange: Made Of Fail...

Within a couple days of each other in the last week, I got my 4th quarter ASCAP publisher’s statement and my “Unit Of Arbitrary Time” artist statement from Sound Exchange. If you click on that picture, you can actually read the numbers. You will notice a large disparity. The ASCAP statement is 113 times the size of the Sound Exchange statement for the roughly equivalent unit of time.

I’m not necessarily pointing out the disparity in income from the two sources here, because my ASCAP checks are entirely from television, a more-or-less profitable medium, while Sound Exchange assfucks unprofitable start-ups, and businesses made of lose, so there’s no real shock about that. My point is in the relative effort I expended to get those checks. When I joined ASCAP, about a week after my first album was released, the entire event largely consisted of walking in to the building across the street from Lincoln Center and saying “hey, I’d like to join up.” I signed my name to a form that a members services person filled out for me, and that was that. The checks started up about a year later, and haven’t stopped.

Now, with Sound Exchange, it was a somewhat different process, to put it mildly. First off, Sound Exchange doesn’t collect performance royalties, which is what ASCAP, BMI et al collect. Performance royalties are split between the songwriter and the publisher of the song, are paid where music is performed (on television, in elevators, at Starbucks, etc.), and are there to ensure that the chump that wrote the song can pay his rent. Sound Exchange is entirely a child of the RIAA, and in order to justify their existence, they made up an entirely new royalty category. Inexplicably, they collect royalties from Sirius/XM (who, I might add, already have to pay MONSTER ASCAP and BMI licenses), all the interweb streaming services (ditto), that sort of thing.

The way the RIAA pulled this off was by lobbying Orin Hatch to slip this new royalty category in to the DMCA, long story short. They did it so that labels who felt they were losing money on digital transmissions (because, you know, RealAudio and Sirius are “CD Quality” and stuff) could get a little something on the back end. So entirely unlike ASCAP/BMI performance royalties, which go to the writer and his publisher, Sound Exchange royalties go to the label and the performer.

While it may not seem like such a bad deal if you’re the label or performer, you obviously haven’t filled out Sound Exchange’s forms yet. To anyone with even a passing understanding of copyright, it was readily apparent to me from the day I started the week-long process of getting my lengthy catalog in their system that they were making it up as they went.

Now, up until Audio Damage came along, my income consisted almost entirely of royalty checks of one form or another. I’m a fairly intelligent person, I’d like to think, and I’ve taken the time to educate myself about what royalties I should be getting, why I get them, and how to finesse those sources of income. But Sound Exchange boggled me. I had to call them for clarification several times (and don’t forget I had to do all this twice, as a label and as an artist; the above statement is the “artist” portion of the proceeds) and, as I said, I spent about a week dealing with their nonsense.

The statements they send don’t actually contain any information at all. This latest one was 9 pages, and each page had the same entry, exactly as you see it in the picture: SISTER MACHINE GUN 16.47. This leads me to believe that the only performances they were able to notice were of my 90s band, even though my other two projects get equal or greater internet airplay. So there’s that. I have no idea whatsoever what source this 16.47 came from, why it came, or how to make it better. I don’t know what song it was for, or how to split it among the other performers. In short, the information is entirely useless, and as such isn’t information at all. Since Sound Exchange sends these statements basically when they feel like it, I don’t even know when the fuck this happened.

Now, I’m not the sort of person that looks a gift horse in the mouth, and as a content provider rather than a content consumer, I value all income streams that I can get my greedy little hands on. But Sound Exchange has got to be one of the dumbest rackets in the music industry, and is yet another way that the RIAA is steadily trying to turn the recording industry back in to the sharecropping of the 60s when they were happy. Leonard Chess would be proud.