Artists who signed before 2000 with music rights company Warner Music Group, and still have copyright debt, are in luck. This February 1, the company has announced that they will pay the royalties they owe prior to the turn of the century. When we talk about royalties, we refer to the rights that the authors had over the songs that they themselves had created. You make a song and I pay you an amount to exploit that product, and that’s where there was a pending gap between artists and the record company. Warner will imitate Sony, which already communicated last year that it would resume those exploitation rights payments that were pending. (via NME)
These contracts that were signed in the last century were practically forgotten for many of these companies, but Sony has been a pioneer in returning the money it owes to all its artists, and Warner has followed suit. It doesn’t look like it’s the last because it looks like Universal can do it too.
This means that for any legacy artists whose rights were withheld due to not getting advances back from their original label, they will now start receiving these payments retroactively starting this summer. The program that WMG will use will be under the name of “Unrecovered Legacy Advance Program”, which will be launched on July 1. Therefore, these unrecovered debts will enter a cycle where these artists will be gradually paid. Come on, little by little they will recover the money.
We learned all this through a statement from Warner that said the following: “We have announced a legacy unrecovered advance program where, for our artists and songwriters who signed with us before 2000 and did not receive an advance during or after 2000, we will not apply their unrecovered advances to royalty statements for any period that begins on or after July 1, 2022. The show will also benefit other participating artist royalty such as producers, engineers, mixers and remixers.”
Since 2009, Warner has taken care to share all the advances and guarantees in streaming services with its artists, “treating breakup like other digital revenue”.
As we have seen in Music Business Worldwide, several sources suggest that another of the major record companies that exist today, such as Universal, will also start up so that the money not recovered by its artists and composers returns to their pockets. This statement may be given in the coming weeks.
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