There are multiple options for artists when it comes to publishing administration, and WordPlay T. Jay recently changed his beat, opting to leave Songtrust and join Tunecore.
T. Jay said the switch was not due to anything overly negative or competitive, but had to do with him evaluating his situation and workload when it came to publishing.
“I was coming up on my deal with Songtrust, and I had logged in several times over several months, about a year, and I couldn’t see any visual progress of the status of my applications,” he said. “I’m used to having total transparency, and I didn’t have that with Songtrust’s user interface.”
T. Jay said he reached out to the company, and the administrator he spoke with was helpful and informative, manually pushing through some of the things that were in T. Jay’s agreement in the first place.
“I emailed them and asked about the progress of my requests, and it turned out they weren’t being handled correctly,” T. Jay said. “What I realized with that is that I sat for a while without doing anything. Songtrust is a big company and humans make mistakes, and that’s no excuse, but I understand and I’m not that upset because it’s my responsibility to be checking on them.”
T. Jay said after that experience, he felt the need to switch.
“For the past nine months, I’ve been registering with PROs, mechanical licensing, content ID and SoundExchange, and it’s a lot of work on my own,” he said. “I needed to evaluate my workload.”
T. Jay has all his information in spreadsheets and said he could do everything on his own, which saves him 15 percent in royalties taken by a publishing administrator, but it would have taken him too long.
“My thought process was that I could trade that time of registrations for the 15 percent on the back end and let Tunecore do that administration for me,” he said.
T. Jay signed up with Tunecore, which charges a one-time fee of $70, then a 15 percent commission and 10 percent sync commission for anything licensed on the artist’s behalf.
Tuncore allows artists to register independent songs or songs distributed by Tunecore, and it offers worldwide administration, monetizing commissions on YouTube, sync licensing opportunities and artists to keep 100 percent of the copyrights. Mechanical royalties and direct licensing are also included.
After registering, T. Jay had to update his tax information and his PRO information to let Tunecore know he’s registered with ASCAP. From there, he could start inputting songs.
In the manage compositions section, he added one song’s information, which included things like the title, artist, album, percent of ownership, etc., and Tunecore said to allow a few weeks for processing and check his email for sync licensing opportunities.
In the email, T. Jay can reply with links to his songs on digital streaming services to become licensed and collect digital royalties. In the video below, he did a single song, but he could send multiple at once via a spreadsheet or in the email body. Song files can also be uploaded to DropBox.
For more information about Tunecore and frequently asked questions, like when payouts occur, check out the end of T. Jay’s video.