Why Do Music Royalties Data Matter? Listen Up

Royalties or copyrights?

Royalty is the legal right to use the asset after paying the owner. For the creators, royalties usually come in the form of recurring payments. 

Royalties are part of copyright law, which protects intellectual property and provides creators with exclusive rights to manage their own work. Royalty payments can be sometimes referred to as license fees.

Royalties in the music industry

Music royalties work in the same way as those in other industries and protect the music creators' original work. The copyright tradition in the music industry isn't that old – it only applies to works created after 1978. According to the current US copyright law, the work is protected for the lifetime of the last surviving author plus another 70 years. 

Music copyrights can be classified into two categories: composition and sound recording. There’re different streams of royalty payments depending on their category.

Different types of music royalties

In order to not get lost among various stakeholders, music royalties were classified into four main groups. There could be even more depending on the specific music creating use cases, but the core principles remain the same. 

1. Mechanical royalties. Say you've just finished your masterpiece and released it. The royalty payments, in this case, would be shared by you and the performer. If you're the performer, things are easier because you can take it all. 
2. Performance royalties are received from the performance of the copyrighted songs. Even a single play on platforms such as Spotify counts, allowing the artists and performers to make a buck from that.
3. Sync royalties are generated when the copyrighted tunes are used for visual and streaming media. Usually, it happens when the music is used for commercial purposes, like broadcasting on TV, ads, movies, video games, and YouTube clips. The royalty payment amount usually includes a one-time negotiation between the copyright holder and the publisher.
4. Print music royalties. This is the least common royalty type because it applies more to music composers than recording artists. Payments are received after the music notes are printed and distributed.

Metadata serves as an ID for a song to be identified and receive the deserved payments. It also makes the piece easier to find and categorize among the ocean of already existing masterpieces. Metadata of songs usually consist of the album title, writers' and publishers' names, the record label, ISRC (International Standard Recording Code), etc. Such technical data plays a huge role and allows many musicians and music writers to get adequate payments for their work.

However, music-related metadata usually isn't synchronized enough, making it harder to track and leaving a gap for people to play music illegally. Then it becomes almost impossible to calculate the amount of lost income due to infringements of copyrights. 

Gathering metadata may sound like the most simple technical procedure, but the collection isn't as easy as pie in practice. There were no standards for collecting, authenticating, or storing metadata for years. Gladly, the situation is changing as metadata collection becomes a new cool, making it easier to spot copyright infringement.

The magic behind the metadata collection

One of the mighty solutions to solve the problem of illegal music usage and publishing is data collection. Metadata scraping aims to keep an eye on the usage of music in real-time and attempts to spot unlicensed players faster than before. The music creators can scan music royalties data on such sites:

• Social media (Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc.);
• Various websites and networks.

So, if you wanna be sure that there're no boundaries related to copyright law being crossed, you have to check it yourself. Doing it with your original IP could be a real headache because: 

1. You’ll probably need wide geo-locations targeting options; 
2. CAPTCHAs and other antibot systems might complicate your research. 

To play it smoothly and avoid such hardships, you can grab residential proxies or Web Scraping API, depending on your goals.

Residential proxies can be your buddies if you have your own scraping and parsing software. Simply because you can:

• Perform metadata checks from over 195+ locations, including city-level targeting;
• Choose from rotating and sticky (up to 30 minutes) sessions options;
• Forget shared subnets or setup fees and other problems because our residential IPs have none of that.

If you're not up to building your own scraping infrastructure, Smartproxy’s all-in-one Web Scraping API could serve all your needs. Our precious tool can offer you:

• Stress-free scraping experience since the Scraping API includes proxy management and data gathering;
• Paying only for successful results. If your request fails, fret not; it's not what you're gonna pay for. Our beauty will deliver only successful results. 
• Getting results in real-time. Yup, we deliver the freshest results in town without errors, so you don’t need to worry about outdated data.

Final note

Music royalties help artists earn their bread-and-butter for their work. Still, old habits of violating music copyrights cause artists' potential income losses. Constantly scraping metadata can do the job of preventing such actions.