Sony/ATV Music Publishing has upgraded its SCORE royalty portal, giving songwriters access to easy-to-navigate, real-time data about their earnings.
The portal provides detailed data for both current earnings and historic information that can be sorted and organized by song title, income source, time period and territory, with the ability to drill down further. The company expects to soon complement the portal upgrade by also providing an app to improve the portal's accessibility by phone.
For example, users accessing the portal by computer can see two tabs at at the top of a portal page, for current and historical data. After choosing one of the tabs, the sub menu's will allow the songwriters to see a statement, earnings, source, and sub-source, by territory and song income type, such as mechanicals broken out by download, physical and streaming, among other songwriting license types. Users can then also break that information down by song and service, and further see what amount is going to Sony and what amount they are getting, as it tracks earnings by the songwriter's share. Moreover, that data is also provided in easy-to-read graphs and charts, too. All data is current as of the previous weekend.
"As the world's No. 1 music publisher, Sony/ATV prides itself on providing our songwriters and their teams an unsurpassed level of transparency and service with highly detailed royalty information," Sony/ATV chairman and CEO Martin Bandier said in a statement.
The portal is overseen by Sony/ATV's administration team which collects data locally with the help of the company's global field staff and insure that the publisher's songs are accurately registered with societies around the world.
"All of the administration teams around the world are proud and pleased with this new release of SCORE not only because it provides writers unparalleled access to their information, but also because it demonstrates to our writers the level of attention we pay to them and their songs," Sony/ATV's senior VP of worldwide administration Dale Esworthy said in a statement.
The company says its portal upgrades are part of ongoing efforts to ensure that Sony songwriters are provided with a level of service and transparency unmatched in music publishing. Moreover, the system tracks Sony's payments to the songwriter, advancements, adjustments and even the check number from the payment.
But beyond songwriters, business managers and artist managers can collectively see all of their clients data with equal transparency and data messaging tools available; or on a client-by-client basis. Further, all the data can be downloaded to spreadsheets, or in PDF or text formats.
"The ability to see current earnings almost in real time is so helpful," Sony songwriter Tom Douglas said in a statement. "The historical data provides a great snapshot as it relates to my royalties and I particularly love the 'Song Summary' tab. The creative relationship with a publisher is obviously critical, but maybe the most under-appreciated part of one's relationship with the publisher is royalty and accounting."
