Word Collections Launches ‘Songwriter Collections’ Service

Word Collections has launched a royalty service, Songwriter Collections, designed to reduce fraud and speed up payments on the digital side.

Five-year-old Word Collections just recently announced Songwriter Collections, which it says has direct pacts in place with Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and a variety of different DSPs.

Overall, the arrangement enables member songwriters and publishers to receive “100% of their earned royalties from global digital streaming,” per Word Collections.

That’s due in part to the above-mentioned fraud-reduction benefits. But Word Collections further emphasized data-quality improvements and the elimination of “intermediary deductions” when describing Songwriter Collections’ advantages.

Also on the “intermediary” front, the service is said to handle licensing, admin, collections, auditing, and payments internally; among other things, the streamlined approach purportedly delivers “royalties up to a year faster.”

Following those points to their logical conclusion, Songwriter Collections is said to track and secure the appropriate royalties for each “streamed recording” at hand. Besides originals, that includes covers, remixes, rereleases, and more, Black Squirrel Partners-backed Word Collections indicated.

As described by the same source, Songwriter Collections is therefore well-positioned to chip away at today’s huge pile of unmatched “black box” royalties.

If their rightful owners aren’t identified, these royalties are seemingly destined to reach rightsholders based on market share – a situation that, for obvious reasons, would benefit leading publishers.

But according to Jeff Price-founded Word Collections, its newly established service can recover stateside “royalties dating back to 2002.” Internationally, the advertised recovery capabilities extend to usages “between one and a half to two years” old, per the appropriate company.

Without diving too much deeper into Songwriter Collections’ specifics, the service doesn’t charge an upfront fee and deals in six-month terms that can be terminated with 30 days’ notice at any time after the initial term’s conclusion, per higher-ups.

Additionally, songwriters and publishers can tap Songwriter Collections to handle digital royalties for particular songs and/or certain markets, execs noted. And the service is said to accommodate third-party publishing admin agreements to boot, simply forwarding collected digital royalties accordingly.

Having scored a deal with Richard Marx this past summer, the overarching Word Collections currently counts as clients Metallica, Eminem publisher Eight Mile Style, and Greta Van Fleet, to name a few.