AllTrack, a US-based collection company founded in 2017, has announced the launch of an engineering rights division. AllTrack members can now choose to collect their mechanical royalties along with their performance royalties, making AllTrack the only US performance royalties organization (PRO) to collect both through a single platform.
In motion, says AllTrack Bulletin board hopes to compete with DIY publishing managers like SongTrust or TuneCore Publishing, which offer short-term deals for small independent songwriters, who are often looking for an interim solution to collect royalties before signing larger publishing deals.
AllTrack's mechanical collection service will charge a 15% administration fee for all royalties collected, and authors using the service must sign a 2-year agreement.
Around the world, it is common for collecting societies to collect both performance royalties and engineering royalties on behalf of authors, but these have always been separate services in the United States, adding to the complexity of the royalty collection process for songwriters. Since the passage of the Music Modernization Act (MMA) in 2017, legislation that simplified the mechanical rights collection process for the streaming era, mechanical data for interactive streaming has been collected by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) under mandate MMA.
MLC is open to any songwriter who wants to join. Unlike PROs, it does not charge an administration fee to any songwriter or publisher to collect, match and process rights, since the MMA ordered streaming services to pay for MLC's functions. When a songwriter signs up for AllTrack's mechanical service, those mechanics are still processed with MLC, but AllTrack becomes the link that ensures the songwriter is properly registered and collects royalties from MLC. Essentially, the company wants to offer a one-stop service for freelance writers who find the multi-society royalty collection system too cumbersome.
AllTrack will also collect mechanical rights for its clients in areas outside of MLC's domain, including social media services such as TikTok, YouTube and Meta, as well as fitness and gaming apps.
“We're excited to expand our services to include engineering royalties, which typically represent a significant portion of a music creator's publishing revenue,” he says. Hayden Bauerfounder and CEO of AllTrack. “Our integrated approach addresses the independent sector's long-standing need for a simplified royalty collection process. AllTrack members can now get the compensation they're entitled to faster and more efficiently than ever before.”
The news comes just months after AllTrack announced it had been accepted into CISAC (International Confederation of Societies of Writers and Composers) and after the US PRO system came under more scrutiny. In September, Bulletin board news broke that the House Judiciary Committee had sent a letter to the Copyright Office asking for further consideration of PROs, citing “difficult assessment” of royalty collections and the “proliferation of PROs.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/alltrack-mechanical-rights-division/
