Music goes missing more often than you think. Great recordings go out of commercial circulation and never get onto digital platforms. This is why labels like LA’s Real Gone reissue lost gems and important curiosities from past decades, bringing back musical moments for dedicated fans. And they have turned to Loudr to manage their complex mechanical licensing.

The process of finding the next release is part deliberation, part serendipity. Gordon Anderson, the Real Gone co-founder who’s been in the reissue label business for decades, has gotten release ideas from exquisite live bootlegs (Anderson begged the band in question, Tower of Power, to license it, and the quality of the concert convinced the skeptical artists to say yes) and record aficionado requests.

After watching the documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, Anderson found a solo record by knock-out singer Lisa Fischer who was featured in the film. He called up his contact at the label behind the out-of-print album to see if it was available for reissue. It was, and “it is one of our best selling releases,” Anderson notes.

Bringing rightsholders around to agree to a reissue can be straightforward, or it can be a process that requires “patience and persistence.” “Every license is different and every licensor has different rules,” Anderson explains. “The majors have theirs, then there are the indie rightsholders or companies that have accumulated labels like Sun Records. Often we’re dealing with artist estates. They have their particular challenges.”

Anderson has learned to roll with the punches when it comes to securing the agreement of rightsholders, but he and Real Gone knew they could not manage the mechanicals side of their licensing obligations with music publishers and songwriters on their own. They have relied on Loudr, which specializes in mechanicals, data matching, and other related sides of music licensing for the underlying copyrighted songs, to administer this side of their business.

“When we put together a release, we may be compiling tracks from different sources, or have different artists interpreting songs over an extended period of time,” says Anderson. “Twenty tracks can often mean twenty different publishers. Loudr sorts through all that. By the nature of our business, we need someone to handle this and if we did it in house, it would be a full-time job.”

Loudr has created licensing services that help musicians and labels, focusing on the needs of growing market niches (YouTube-first artists who often use covers to engage their audiences, as well as video game music). “We’ve gained extensive experience managing complex licensing questions for independent operators, and that lets us support a wide range of businesses at scale and at a very reasonable price point,” notes Loudr CEO Chris Crawford. “It’s great to license these releases from Real Gone that present pleasant challenges from a rights perspective and let labels get excellent music back on the market.”

As the video game industry has surpassed film and television as the most popular form of digital entertainment, it’s no surprise that the soundtracks and composers are building fandoms of their own. Game music fans follow the music avidly across platforms, buying CDs, downloading soundtracks, and streaming it millions of times. Materia Collective, a leading video game music publisher and label, gets composers’ work into the spotlight and creates high-quality, high-concept original projects inspired by games’ worlds and sounds.

Materia Collective has teamed up with San Francisco-based music rights company Loudr to power its licensing needs, thanks to Loudr’s experience with video game music licensing. “The video game music scene is tight-knit and supportive, and we’ve gotten to know the publishers behind the content," explains Jesse Buddington, Loudr’s Director of Licensing. "These video game studios often engage in work-for-hire agreements with their composers and are only starting to realize that this gives them copyright in their games’ soundtracks. We’ve used our mechanical licensing expertise to help studios understand their music publishing rights, enabling their works to be performed by their many talented fans.”

Materia Collective’s sound ranges from quirky pop-rock to epic orchestral; from remix and tribute collections dedicated to Final Fantasy to the soundtrack to blockbuster indie game UNDERTALE. The label also administers the publishing rights for several composers and songwriters who write original music for games.

To support Materia Collective’s creators and songwriters, Loudr will process license requests and usage information delivered by the label, secure mechanical licenses for identified works, and administer royalty payments to related rightsholders.

“Loudr is the perfect partner for Materia Collective and our roster of artists,” notes Materia Collective founder Sebastian Wolff. “We have long believed that composers should be compensated for commercial covers and remixes of their work. While it is easier than ever to distribute music, rights administration across the digital landscape has grown to be a hugely complex task. Our mission is to bring great soundtracks into the spotlight, and Loudr helps us empower the underserved gamemusic artist community with the tools required to meet these goals. We are excited about the opportunities that we can now provide to our roster of artists.”

About Loudr
San Francisco-based Loudr® builds products and services that help content creators, aggregators, and music services identify rights holders, secure mechanical licenses, and pay royalties to music publishers. Powered by technology that parses publishing metadata and matches sound recordings to compositions, Loudr makes it easy for builders and creators to secure music rights clearance and report royalties at scale. To date, the company has distributed over $1 million in royalties to songwriters and music publishers worldwide.  

About Materia Collective

Materia Collective is a video game music publisher and label, representing an international array of renowned video game musicians, composers, and songwriters. The Seattle-based music company has become known within the game industry as a representation of highly innovative game music endeavors that move and inspire.

Loudr, the tech-driven solution for mechanical licensing and royalty administration, has connected with Recisio, a multifaceted music company based in Lille, to provide better licensing and administration services for the French company’s karaoke and music education products.

“We’re thrilled to be working with Recisio to deepen and streamline their licensing approach,” says Chris Crawford, CEO of Loudr. “Loudr supports Recisio’s current deals and, crucially, fills in mechanical licensing gaps when needed. This is a consistent need for the music services space,” as several services’ recent legal woes attest.

Recisio’s products include Karaoke-Version (online store for a wide range of backing tracks), KaraFun (karaoke streaming service), and Jamzone (iPad instrument learning app).

Loudr will process license requests from Recisio through Loudr's API, secure mechanical licenses for identified works when they don't map to Recisio's pre-existing deals, process usage information for all licensed works, and administer royalty payments for the additional licenses that Loudr secures. In short, Loudr will close any holes, solve any mysteries, and get rightsholders paid efficiently.

“We have always worked hard to ensure our licensing and royalty payments were optimal, and teaming up with Loudr is another step in that direction,” notes Philippe Marchal, Licensing Manager of Recisio. “This will only improve our service, for users and rights holders.”

Loudr’s licensing services are already helping one of Europe’s largest indie music distributors, Zebralution, manage their US mechanicals. “Mechanical licensing is the Achilles heel for many services, even the most conscientious,” Crawford states. “Loudr is helping more and more clients address the issue and do the right thing for songwriters, publishers, and other rights holders.”

About Loudr
San Francisco-based Loudr® (loudr.fm) builds products and services that help content creators, aggregators, and music services identify rights holders, secure mechanical licenses, and pay royalties to music publishers. Powered by technology that parses publishing metadata and matches sound recordings to compositions, Loudr makes it easy for builders and creators to secure music rights clearance and report royalties at scale. To date, the company has distributed over $1 million in royalties to songwriters and music publishers worldwide.  

Zebralution, one of the leading digital media distributors for independent labels and audiobook publishers, and Loudr®, a music rights technology company, have announced a strategic licensing partnership today. The deal provides Zebralution with comprehensive DPD licensing for its labels and royalty administration services, as well as access to Loudr client features such as real-time publishing metadata for licensed works via Loudr's API and catalog matching against U.S. Copyright Office database. 

"We've chosen to work with Loudr because we understand the importance of music rights in the distribution chain" said Kurt Thielen, Managing Director of Zebralution. "Through the Loudr platform, we're able to support our label clients with DPD licenses to drive US content sales, as well as support our music service partners with comprehensive rights metadata."

"It's important to both Loudr and Zebralution to ensure that publishers and songwriters are properly compensated," said Loudr CEO Chris Crawford. "We're pleased to support Zebralution's commitment to compliance by supporting its extensive roster of labels with licensing, accounting, and royalty administration services."

U.S. copyright laws call for mechanical licenses when music downloads are distributed in the United States through consumer music services. Each digital download sale requires the payment of a mechanical royalty in the amount of $0.091 for songs of five minutes or less, or $0.0175 per minute for songs over five minutes. The Loudr platform uses big data processes and machine learning to help music distributors and other businesses link sound recordings to songwriters and publishing rights holders, and pay out royalties to publisher's based on ownership share. 

About Zebralution
Founded in 2003 Zebralution is a leading distributor of digital media content, including music, videos, audio books, and other entertainment products. Headquartered in Duisburg, Germany, with offices in Berlin, Los Angeles, Paris and Barcelona, Zebralution services more than 600 licensors mainly from Europe, the UK, and the United States as well as a variety of streaming and digital download services worldwide (www.zebralution.com)

About Loudr
San Francisco-based Loudr® (loudr.fm) builds products and services that help content creators, aggregators, and music services identify rights holders, secure mechanical licenses, and pay royalties to music publishers. Powered by technology that parses publishing metadata and matches sound recordings to compositions, Loudr makes it easy for builders and creators to secure music rights clearance and report royalties at scale. To date, the company has distributed over $1 million in royalties to songwriters and music publishers worldwide.  

Loudr is rolling out a new version of its API, the company’s latest step in advancing the once quiet music-business niche of mechanical licensing. The new version adds features that will make it even easier to find, manage, and link musical compositions and their owners. It even calculates royalties for clients based on their specific parameters, automatically.

It’s part of a larger effort to change the way licensing gets done in the U.S. Since compliance with specific copyright regulations is at the heart of compulsory licensing, digital mechanicals have proven difficult to manage at scale. The challenges of digital licensing are often complexified by the absence of comprehensive data and a means of coherently assembling from multiple data sources. Loudr has solved the problem by applying cutting-edge tech tools to the business processes the company developed when it got its start manually securing cover-song licenses for a cappella groups.

“Loudr's operational process combines knowledgeable human experts with a robust technology platform,” says Jesse Buddington, Loudr’s Director of Licensing. “The music licensing process has a great number of moving parts with multiple, branching steps, but is ultimately programmable with the right guidance. Our platform simultaneously learns from and augments our research team's efforts, allowing us to process an ever-increasing number of data points at an impressive degree of accuracy.”

That specificity is a major improvement over past practices, and offers a true alternative to current haphazard approaches to licensing, be it mass NOIs or other attempts to bury the problem of data matching, royalty administration, and licenses for digital music.

“Our systems are equipped to take in and process sensitive client data, and make the necessary calculations to generate a rate for each interactive streaming offering,” explains Loudr General Counsel Annie Lin. “This is similar to what other companies in the space do, except that Loudr's API offers much more transparency to the client as to what goes into the calculation.” Clients of Loudr’s API, which include CD Baby, Zebralution, and DistroKid, range from major indie distributors to music service platforms with large catalogs.

Loudr also manages the flood of data that has inundated music services, connecting the dots programmatically via its machine learning-powered data matching solutions (i.e. connecting compositions to recordings en masse). “We have data -- a lot of it -- and we've built a system to not only pull together the disparate pieces of music ownership data, but also a system to intelligently parse, categorize, and organize that data so that it can be presented back to our clients as structured metadata,” Lin continues. “By structured metadata, we mean data that is immediately actionable and can be used to inform the distribution process or power music-related user experiences, for example, products that let consumers ask ‘who wrote that song?’” 

“We're taking a different pathway,” Buddington notes. “The ethos is making the connection quickly and in a scalable way to help our clients make the most of the information.”

About Loudr
San Francisco-based Loudr® (loudr.fm) builds products and services that help content creators, aggregators, and music services identify rights holders, secure mechanical licenses, and pay royalties to music publishers. Powered by technology that parses publishing metadata and matches sound recordings to compositions, Loudr makes it easy for builders and creators to secure music rights clearance and report royalties at scale. To date, the company has distributed over $1 million in royalties to songwriters and music publishers worldwide.