We’re CD Baby. And We Want to Fix the Songwriter Royalty Mess, Once and for All…

Please file under: ‘Solutions’. The following comes from CD Baby president Brian Felsen, who has an ambitious plan to help independent songwriters get paid on all their global activity.



Whenever music is used in TV, radio, internet, live performance, video games, film, and more — royalties are owed to the songwriter. But signing up for a performing rights organization like ASCAP or BMI is not enough.

A seemingly endless number of organizations around the world collect royalties for songwriters. The challenge is actually claiming your money.

Until now, it’s been virtually impossible for independent songwriters to collect all the royalties owed to them on a global level. So we aim to remedy this with a comprehensive royalty collection service called CD Baby Pro. CD Baby Pro is designed to give independent artists the same royalty collection resources that major label artists have benefited from for years, plus the benefit of worldwide music distribution.

You can’t knock on all those doors yourself. That’s why we created CD Baby Pro; we’re doing all the door-knocking for you.

How are we going to pull this off? CD Baby has partnered with digital publishing service SongTrust to interface with performance rights organizations and collect royalties on the artist’s behalf.

Here’s an example: anytime you sell a download overseas, you’re owed mechanical royalties that can only be collected from the local performance rights organization. Any time your music is played on streaming sites like Spotify, you’re owed publishing royalties in addition to the normal streaming fee you’re paid by the retailer. Any time your music is placed in a TV show you’re owed performance royalties beyond the fee you’ve already been paid for the sync license. With CD Baby Pro, we’ll make sure you get paid every time.

Let me go into more detail. CD Baby Pro includes 4 primary services.

(1) Worldwide music distribution (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and more).

(2) Songwriter affiliation/registration with ASCAP or BMI

(3) Song registration with ASCAP or BMI, as well as collection agencies from around the world.

(4) Global Royalty Collection on the artist’s behalf.

Right now, CD Baby Pro is now available for all US-based artists. It costs just $99 per album and $39 per single. This one-time submission fee also includes the full arsenal of CD Baby’s distribution services: sales on download and streaming sites like iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Google Play, and more; physical distribution to over 15,000 brick-and-mortar record stores worldwide; CD Baby’s Sync Licensing program; and all CD Baby’s promotional tools, such as their MusicStore for Facebook app and their HTML Music Store widget.

For existing CD Baby artists, CD Baby Pro is now available as an add-on. The upgrade to CD Baby Pro takes minutes to complete and costs $59 per album or $39 per single.

I’m really interested in knowing what you think. For more information, please go here.

– Brian