For most musicians, the process of registering a song for royalties summons a bespoke blend of boredom and dread. There’s metadata to be sorted out, a host of different regional copyright bodies to consider, and a number of different royalties and rights to get your head around.
For Bobby Cole, founder and managing director of Melody Rights, the intricacies of music royalties are like bread and butter. With some two decades of experience writing stock music, and thousands of credits to his name, it’s a subject that, out of necessity, he’s had to learn an awful lot about. His expert opinion? The current system is confusing, complex, opaque, barely fit for purpose, and ripe for disruption.
“We’re trying to shake things up,” says Cole. “Melody Rights exists to make this side of the industry a hell of a lot easier.”
Launched in January of this year, Melody Rights operates similarly to platforms like DistroKid, CD Baby, and Tunecore, enabling users to manage and distribute their music easily. Crucially, however, the service that Melody Rights offers is aimed at entirely different targets. Rather than focusing on streaming platforms, the company specialises in the less flashy, but lucrative, world of library music — getting users’ tracks onto platforms where they might be synced for video games, film and TV, and other media.
“We don’t touch anything that platforms like DistroKid do, and they don’t touch anything that we do,” Cole emphasises. “We don’t upload to Spotify. We don’t send music to the DSPs. We’ve removed ourselves from that conversation simply because there are so many people already doing it, and they do it faster, better, and cheaper than we ever could.
“But those services don’t do computer game marketplaces,” Cole continues. “They don’t register your royalties, they don’t do neighbouring rights, they don’t do mechanical royalties. We can’t find anyone else that does the full list of things that we do.”
The number of services that Melody Rights can provide is expansive, to the point where it’s hard to characterise the company succinctly. This is something Cole doesn’t shy away from. “Is Melody Rights a distributor?” he asks rhetorically. “Is it a publisher? Is it an administration company? Is it a record label? I don’t think you can pigeonhole us, because there are elements of all these things.”
On the distribution side, the company connects with game asset stores like Game Dev Marketplace and Itch.io, and more traditional music licensing platforms such as Pond5 and AudioSparx. While you can’t send your music to DSPs like Apple Music and Spotify, you can upload to platforms like Bandcamp and Soundcloud. On the publishing and administration side, Melody Rights advertises its capacity to register for and collect various royalty types and to manage YouTube’s Content ID system.
By liberally pulling together a diverse range of services into one hybrid platform, Cole says Melody Rights can offer a simple but powerful hub for managing music. “You’ve got one dashboard,” he says of the user interface. “You can upload all of your content to us and then pick and choose where you send the music to. If you don’t want your music in gaming marketplaces, that’s fine, it’s just a matter of ticking a checkbox.”
The service operates on a subscription basis, with the lowest pricing tier of $5 allowing you to upload five tracks per month. From there, it increases in steps up to 50 songs for $50 per month. Cole defends the pricing, saying: “For most people, opening a Music Publishers Association account costs around £400 and that’s just one account of many. For a DIY musician to open all the accounts that we have would cost them roughly £1,200. So, this is a tool that enables musicians to get all their registrations done correctly, quickly, and cheaply.”
At launch, Melody Rights took a percentage of any royalties generated through the platform — however, this policy was quickly dropped in favour of a model that leaves the full amount of royalties with the creator.
“Places like CD Baby take around 8% [of royalties],” Cole offers as a comparison. “Some of the traditional administration companies can take between 15% and 20%. They have to do that because their system is more manual – ours is completely automated, and this means we can give the artist 100% of whatever money is found.”
Having only launched a few months ago, Cole says the team is still acutely focused on building Melody Rights’ user base. At the same time, he isn’t shy about his future goals for the platform. “We’d like to have our own ecosystem,” states Cole. “We’d like to have tools within the Melody Rights platform that let you automatically master or remix the songs you upload. We’d love to make our dashboard feature rich at no expense to the user.”
Regardless of whether Melody Rights eventually becomes a one-stop shop, what it offers right now is undeniably intriguing. Few musicians are in a position to ignore potential sources of income, yet the world of stock music has remained stubbornly niche even as there has been an explosion of bedroom producers.
This can partially be explained by the huge administrative overheads that come with the territory. A career, or even a side hustle, composing stock music depends on scale. Creators need to be able to make and upload large amounts of music to a wide range of markets and platforms – yet each song requires a painful number of bureaucratic steps before you can ever hope to get paid.
Simplifying and streamlining this notoriously complicated aspect of the music business would not only make the lives of established stock music composers easier – it would help musicians access an often overlooked sector of the industry at a time when traditional streaming platforms deliver a living wage for only a slim minority of artists.
“There was a time when if you signed to a label they’d take care of all this stuff,” Cole reflects. “For most people, those kinds of deals don’t exist anymore. But with these tools, there’s really no reason why DIY artists can’t do this for themselves. Melody Rights is like having the power of an automated record label in your back pocket for $5 a month. We think it’s quite revolutionary.”
Learn more at Melody Rights.
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