SOMEONE STOLE OUR SONG!!!

Another email in the distribution. Some artist discovers that a name is taking money from them on certain sites. We can see the error so we ask if they have licensed it, someone?

– No, we are the master owner, so we have the rights to the money.
– Yes, you have. But no if you have licensed the song somewhere.
– No, we have only uploaded through you.
– Still, there is a conflict with another account from another distributor?
– Well, we have never done anything, we just want our money.

So I start looking, takes around an hour until I find their stuff on an old record label. Of course, that label has just sold their catalog to a new label and of course when they put it out the conflict is there.

So I get a hold of the new label, that doesn’t know anything about that the band has the right to the master. But they goes back to the old label and ask. This procedure takes around one week. In the meantime, the artist is screaming and emailing all the time that we should resolve the problem and do it fast.

Then it comes back that the first label has a contract and the rights to the master. I present that to the screaming artist.

– Ohh that old label we didn’t know they still existed!
– They don’t but the master is theirs and they sold it to this new company.
– THEY CAN’T DO THAT!
– You have to contact them, we just the distributor, don’t scream at us.
– You have to help us, we have the rights to the master.
– First, we are not your legal service. But they have a contract signed by you that they own the master, and it clearly says they can sell that asset.
– We just thought that it was an old contract and that it’s gone now.

I have this conversation in many different ways every month. It’s never the artist’s fault, but in the end, its’ clearly their fault by doing some stuff some years back. And always they give information like, we never have done this or that and when you check it’s always that they have done it.

This is the reason I don’t want to clean up older bands stuff. It’s full of things. in many cases, you can’t get the information this easy that I did in this case.

What really annoys me I that they are wasting my time, I have nothing to do with your master in a distribution thing.

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