TuneCore Takes On Songwriter Royalties With New Game Changing Service

(UPDATE 2) With today's launch of a new service, TuneCore hopes to help revolutionize songwriter royalty collection as it did digital music distribution. The company's Songwriter Publishing Administration Service helps navigate the confusing world of global performing rights organizations (PROs) and speeds often slow payments directly to the creator. Tunecore has also cut direct deals with iTunes, Spotify and some other digital music services that eliminate PROs and other middlemen entirely.

DETAILS & THE COMPETITION

Tunecore's new royalty collection arm charges a $49.99 plus 10% of funds collected. That's typically much less than the traditional combination performing rights organizations and publisher's charge, and far less hassle for the artist. But the percentage is a major departure from Tunecore's touted flat fee music distribution model. 

The new service will collect funds for anyone – brand new songwriters and established ones. Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor, who has used TuneCore to distribute his music since 2008, has signed on to the new songwriter servIce. In fact, with a distribution customer base which the company says includes more than 100,000 active users, TuneCore could rapidly become a major force in royalty collection.

UPDATE: According to a Tunecore spokesperson: "At the moment you do need to distribute through TuneCore to use the new service.  But plans are in the works for that to change so that any rights holder could sign up."

Tunecore's Songwriter Publishing Administration Service will:

• globally register copyrights
• collects money that is due
• protect and police copyrights
• issues licenses

As Nine Inch Nails and No Doubt manager Jim Guerinot, told the Wall Street Journal, Tunecore founder and CEO Jeff Price has once again "managed to find a very inefficient part of our business that's nontransparent and created an opportunity."  The new songwriter service continues to deliver on Price's oft stated promise to deliver "more money, more quickly, with transparency" to artists. 

FLAT FEE COMPETION: SONGTRUST

But Tunecore's Songwriter Publishing Administration Service has competition and at least one has adopted Tunecore's original flat fee model. Songtrust, a division of established independent publisher Downtown Music launched a similar service several months ago with a flat fee structure ranging from $50 – $100 a year per album plus optional monthly add-ons.

Songtrust says the company just issued its first royalty distribution to beta customers, which they say came from 15 different income types ranging from radio and Internet streaming to plays on digital jukeboxes.

Here's the official TuneCore Songwriter Publishing Administration Service intro video:

TuneCore Songwriter Service from TuneCore on Vimeo.