Getting royalties for a cover.

[rob aylestone]

I've just had a royalties payment and was going through the spreadsheet. It reveals all sorts if you dig in deep. In the UK there is a big department store chain called John Lewis, and they used one of our band tracks on a radio advert campaign last year and it generated a fair bit. I also notice that the BBC keep repeatedly using the same track on many programmes - I expect they don't realise (being produced by young folk, the we are NOT the original band - just seeing the title. It's not just on the popular stations, but for the UK folk here - even Radio 4 used it on Desert Island Discs - and nobody has noticed it is not the original. I suppose the writers also get a payment, so it's not too bad for them - they just lose the actual performance element.

Even weirder is that old show tracks I produced that I put on streaming services are doing really well for a few titles. Backing tracks - no vocals, sort of karaoke I guess, but with lengthening, or different keys, and perhaps different ends. I get that the Adele track might be popular - but Jennifer Rush, the Power of Love is ancient. My own stuff pays very little, but three or four old covers with no vocals are doing OK - but these payments are from 3 years ago, so no idea if next month they will just stop, or carry on. One big chunk this time came from Facebook, TikTok and Instagram? How odd.

 

[Papanate]

What do you use to put your music out there? - Most of the services are getting better at IDing usage and payment (as small as it might be) - for example my Daughters EP of Covers has generated $3000 over the last year - and she has over 1.5 million views on the Socials, YouTube, Spotify, Apple music,and Amazon - the only reason I can tell is our service Tunecore is extremely dilligent and excellent at auditing.

 

[rob aylestone]

Songtradr, ditto and a couple of others.

I've been looking for tiktok users - and found this person using my power of love track. The ones that get me are when I originally used Distrokid, but they froze my account because they suspected I used a 3rd party app to cheat, something I have never done. So one of my tracks distributed through Distrokid still gets used, but I cannot even log in, let alone get any payments from them. Apparently, they do this a lot! Strange having your stuff on very odd videos!