SoundExchange has revealed that it distributed $269 million in royalties, reflecting a 17% year-over-year (YoY) enchancment, throughout 2023’s second quarter.
The 20-year-old entity only recently make clear its second-quarter payouts in an roughly 130-word announcement message. Based on the concise useful resource, SoundExchange – which collects and distributes royalties for using recordings on non-interactive digital platforms like SiriusXM – paid out $497.8 million complete throughout H1 2023.
Might of this 12 months had seen SoundExchange tout its hitting the $10 billion distribution milestone, although it bears noting that everything of 2022 had delivered small slips in each collections ($1.017 billion) and distributions ($959 million).
(As a part of the $10 billion distribution announcement, SoundExchange obtained phrases of assist from Practice lead singer Pat Monahan, who mentioned that the entity “sticks up for artists and makes at the least one a part of this trade simpler to navigate.” Nearer to September’s starting, Practice obtained a “SoundExchange Corridor of Fame Award” that acknowledged the non-interactive listenership prevalence of “Hey, Soul Sister.”)
Nonetheless, ought to SoundExchange distributions for 2023’s latter half meet or exceed H1 ranges, the group would surpass final 12 months’s complete payout and method the $1 billion mark. For extra context, the $497.8 million distribution sum for H1 2023 represents a 7.1% YoY enhance from H1 2022’s $464.9 million, the RIAA indicated in a report of its personal immediately.
Increasing upon these figures, SoundExchange (which now counts as a board member American Federation of Musicians president Tino Gagliardi) sued SiriusXM final month for allegedly failing to cough up “greater than $150 million in royalties owed to artists and copyright homeowners.”
This alleged underpayment, the plaintiff maintained, had resulted partly from the synthetic inflation of income attributable to webcasting in satellite- and online-radio packages.
SiriusXM promptly fired again in opposition to the swimsuit and the claims therein, although, relaying that it’d “all the time revered the rights of creators and artists,” together with by forwarding to SoundExchange north of $5 billion throughout the previous decade.
“SiriusXM has merely adhered to that clear regulatory framework, utilizing a rigorous, examined and honest methodology to determine and allocate income for the streaming part of its bundled packages—a technique utterly in line with precedent from the CRB,” the Liberty Media-owned firm acknowledged. “Moreover, SiriusXM has been clear with SoundExchange from the beginning on its methodology.
“In the present day, royalty funds from SiriusXM characterize over 80% of the statutory royalties that SoundExchange distributes to document labels and performers,” drove residence SiriusXM, which reported having 34 million subscribers as of the second quarter’s finish.