🦾 IC Digest: Mechanicals Reloaded
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🦾 IC Digest: Mechanicals Reloaded
Plus an inside-out majors update, an AI in music roundup/hot take, industry events, what we're listening to, and more!
Hello from the other side of what was *quite* the Q1 here at IC, with new records across the board: sign ups, transactions added, statements created, you name it.
The growth is nice, but mostly we’re looking forward to rising to the challenges of life on this new plateau, so we can continue helping more catalogs get more creators paid more often (new IC theme song?).
Meanwhile the world spins on — below you’ll find news from across the industry, a timely update to our Mechanicals tool, events, what you’re up to, and of course what we’re listening to. Enjoy!
— Hunter, Infinite Catalog co-founder and person who will never stop being impressed by LEN turning the tiniest sample of the afore-linked Andrea True Connection classic into “Steal My Sunshine”
🥞 Inside-out Update
Last month I published an op-ed in MBW identifying and dissecting the rise of music-stack companies dubbed the “inside-out majors”. Since then…
Utopia sold off the recently-acquired Sentric to Believe, their recently-appointed CEO of Music Services went too, and this week they laid off another 15% of their workforce
Downtown also downsized and shook up their executive team
SESAC Music Group bought AudioSalad, a B2B distributor
… so if you’re keeping a list of inside-out majors at home, go ahead and add Believe and SESAC Music Group.
To be clear, we at IC aren’t rooting for or against any of these companies. In fact our goals tend to be similar - a more accessible, transparent music industry that works better for catalogs and creators of all shapes and sizes.
We just want to have an idea of what the bigger fish are up to, and share that interest with others, because we all swim in the same ecosystem. That said we need to be careful not to get toooo distracted by what others are doing, and remember there’s always another hype cycle around the corner. Speaking of which…
Quick Hits // AI in music alert! 🚨
🤖 The AI Drake x Weeknd track heard ‘round the world, since taken down. Finally, people are listening to scam tracks other than bots themselves
🪧 Dada Drummer writes that “AI is a New Technology, but an Old Fight”, calling for a focus on labor rights instead of copyrights, and drawing a line from AI back to the Midler/Waits sound-alike lawsuits of ‘88
🔨 Dave Edwards of the always-intriguing AudioMack tweets that it’s likely to be the distributors of AI-enhanced music who get the hammer dropped on them, not the DSPs
🔥 Hot take: this is not a Napster moment. That was the unleashing of much of the world’s music for free, at a time of $20 CDs and the slow-motion decimation of radio as a music discovery source. This, imho, is a novelty inside an Impressive New Instrument moment. (Also the Badu track with a Drake impersonator is both better and less ethically fraught (he was fine with it)).
There may well be AI-induced change afoot, but currently I can’t see this as much of a threat to anyone making art. The ability to create sound-alike tracks is not new, and the ability to create them at scale isn’t likely to matter in a world already awash in royalty-free music and millions of tracks with no listeners. Drake might be offended, but he’s not likely to lose any streams over it.
🧰 PRODUCT UPDATE
Mechanicals Rate + Tool Updates!
On January 1st, the US Copyright Royalty Board raised US mechanical rates for physical reproductions and permanent downloads to 12 cents per track or 2.31 cents per minute of playing time or fraction thereof. Great for songwriters and publishers, tricky for royalties.
To make mechanicals easier, IC has a tool that lets you calculate US mechanicals for a given time period, automatically accounting for track length, and automatically creating concurrent transactions you can either ignore or account as an expense/advance against payee balances if that’s the deal. You can also use contracts to split the totals, if e.g. you need to pay multiple publishers.
Since many folks will still be calculating mechanicals for transactions from before the rate change, we updated both the default rate and tool itself. We’ve always allowed for custom rate-setting at the track level, but now you can calculate mechanicals for all tracks using the pre-2023 rates by clicking Edit Report on the Mechanicals page and selecting Use pre-2023 rates:
Note this won’t override any tracks that have custom mechanicals rates! More info on the tool and how to use it can be found in the ever-expanding Knowledge Base.
🎉 ANNOUNCEMENTS
We’re once again sponsoring the amazing Indie Label Market for its next London edition on May 20th - check out the full lineup and we hope to see you there!
📆 UPCOMING INDUSTRY EVENTS
+ check out the newly public 🎟 Events Directory for more conferences, festivals, record fairs, webinars, etc!
Apr 22nd ‣ Record Store Day (Global)*
Apr 25th ‣ Music Ally NEXT (London, UK)*
Apr 26th - 28th ‣ International Music Summit (Ibiza, Spain)
Apr 28th - 30th ‣ Sound City Conference (Liverpool, UK)
May 5th - 6th ‣ SPOT Festival (Aarhus, Denmark)
May 6th ‣ Water & Music presents… Wavelengths Summit (NY, US)
May 10th - 13th ‣ The Great Escape (Brighton, UK)*
May 15th - 18th ‣ Music Biz 2023 (Nashville, TN, US)
*we’ll be there // buying records! If you will be too, give us a shout
🙌 WHAT YOU'RE UP TO
ICYMI, our Community Updates last week included new music from Hayden Pedigo + many more, NYC events hosted by Strange Ranger and Weird Sister, new signings at Get Better and Kill Rock Stars, plus upcoming shows, tours & more!
Elene: Kate Davis - Fish Bowl
Hunter: Ryuichi Sakamoto - Playing The Piano
Austin: Aselefech Ashine & Getenesh Kebret
Adam: Sofia Kourtesis - Madres
You can find a Spotify playlist here ft. our favorite tracks!