Sony/ATV Music Publishing is improving the way it reports and pays royalties to its songwriters with a series of major upgrades.
According to an announcement, over the course of the next year, the company will roll out significant new initiatives that will speed up how quickly songwriter earnings are processed and allow songwriters to get paid faster than ever before.
Sony/ATV is introducing real-time inter-company processing for all foreign earnings from every territory in which the company operates. As a result, foreign earnings will now be reported and paid in the same period in which they are collected. This means, for example, that a U.S. songwriter with earnings in December 2019 from one or more overseas territories will receive these royalties in the next regular distribution rather than in the following period as is industry standard.
In addition, Sony/ATV will offer a new Cash Out service, which will allow its songwriters to request some or all of their current royalty balance to be paid immediately, instead of having to wait until the next distribution. This service will be offered to the company’s songwriters without a fee. Once they have made any withdrawals, they will then receive the remainder of their balance during the next regular distribution.
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Sony/ATV Chairman and CEO Jon Platt said: “I am proud to announce these ambitious new initiatives that will help to deliver our strategy to be the best service company in the world for songwriters. Powered by our industry-leading administration operations and best-in-class technology, we can now give our songwriters even greater control over their royalties and ensure that they get paid quicker than ever before.”
Real-time inter-company processing and the Cash Out service will start to be made available over the next year to all Sony/ATV songwriters who are signed up to SCORE, the company’s art royalty portal and app, which gives songwriters and their teams real-time access to their current royalty account and historic earnings.
SCORE also provides an overview of historic earnings information that can be searched and organized by song title, income source, time period and territory.