A few years ago, a music producer noticed that a track he had worked on 20 years previously had been streamed millions of times. It was strange, he thought, because he hadn’t received any royalties from the song.So he contacted his label, who told him they hadn’t been in touch because they did not have his current address.
“If I owed money to a major record label, trust me, they could find me very quickly,” the producer, who asked to remain anonymous, says now.It took two years of “prodding” before the label paid the producer the £20,000 he was owed, as well as an even higher sum to the track’s artist, who hadn’t received their royalties either. “These are people’s lives,” the producer says.
“And I’d love to say I am an exception to the rule, but this is a regular occurrence.”This kind of story is all too familiar to Annabella Coldrick, CEO of the Music Managers Forum, which advocates on behalf of its manager members for a fairer industry. “There’s a lot of that,” she says, describing the above as just one example of how there is “so little transparency in the market”.
On the face of it, the music industry is thriving, with record sales reaching an all-time high in 2024. But not everyone is seeing a fair share of these profits.Sports Team told The i Paper in January they can only keep going because of a ‘patronage model’ “The top of the industry is absolutely booming,” explains Coldrick.
“The world’s biggest artists are earni.
