Last week I got an email from one of the publishers I work with (Eric) asking if I had already received my royalty payment from BMI for a song I wrote which he got placed on the CW Network. The song had gotten a pretty good amount of airplay so the payment was significant enough for him to make sure everything was in order. Unfortunately it wasn’t.
I told Eric that I had not received any payment from BMI for that particular song, but that I would contact them to find out what had happened. I called up BMI and spoke to a registration representative. I explained to her my situation and she quickly went to work on finding out what may have happened. I was on the phone with her about a good 15 to 20 minutes when she told me that they did not have me registered as a songwriter for that particular song. In fact they had not even been collecting songwriter dues for that song at all.
After a little more investigation and communications with my Eric and BMI, we finally discovered what had happened. My publisher’s assistant had registered the song with Eric as the songwriter instead of me. My publisher is registered with both BMI and ASCAP but only as a publisher not as a songwriter. Since BMI did not have Eric registered as a songwriter, they basically were not collecting the writer’s portion of the royalties.
Eric quickly contacted BMI and had the matter corrected, however since no money was collected, no money was available to pay out. I was out of luck. BMI assured us that any further performance royalties the song makes will be properly collected and distributed but as for the plays from CW Network it was too late.
Now at this stage most songwriter’s would be hitting the roof and telling off their publisher, Eric is a very nice guy and runs an honest publishing company and has always been very much on the up & up with me. Since the mistake came out of his office, he offered to give me half of his earnings from the publishing side. This represented a little over $400.00. In essence both Eric and myself lost out on making over $800.00 each because of this one mistake.
So how can you avoid having this happen to you? First off, make sure that after you’ve signed a song with a publisher and he/she lets you know it’s been registered with the PRO (performing rights organization), that you check to see if it was done correctly. This is simple to do. Both BMI and ASCAP have a website which lets you see any songs that are registered with them and who is the publisher is as well as who they have listed as the songwriter. Further more you can see if the songwriters listed are registered with them.
Since you can not be registered with more than one PRO at the same time as a songwriter, it’s important to verify that the publisher shows your correct affiliation on the registration. Most publishers are registered with several PRO’s (usually under different names). If you are registered as a songwriter with BMI, but your publisher registered the song only on ASCAP, you won’t get paid. Also make sure the publisher has your name correctly registered on the proper PRO.
Mistakes happen and all we can do is learn from them. My publisher now has too review all his other works to make sure his assistant didn’t make the same mistake on other registration with other songwriters. This one cost me a nice amount of royalties and possibly a heck of a lot of profit to my publisher.
