Publishing Briefs: CD Baby Hits a New Milestone; Update in Turtles' SiriusXM Case
By Ed Christman
CD Baby Pro Publishing Logo
Elsewhere, SESAC snaps up R.E.M. and Big Deal Partners with Mushroom Music.
-- SESAC have signed a deal to represent R.E.M. and its entire catalog, including songs like "It's The End of the World As We Know It" and "Losing My Religion," for performing rights representation in the U.S. In addition, the R.E.M. band members have also signed individually with SESAC.
"We are proud to represent the songs of a band that, without question, changed rock music forever," SESAC Holdings' chairman/CEO John Josephson said in a statement.
-- Big Deal Music has signed on to serve as North American sub-publisher for Mushroom Music Publishing, whose roster includes, the Temper Trap, Birds of Tokyo, Vance Joy and the Rubens.
Artists Mentioned
In turn, Mushroom Music Publishing has been representing Big Deal in Australia since the founding of the latter firm five years ago.
"There has always been good business involved with a strong friendship and mutual respect between all of us," Mushroom Music Publishing M.D. Ian James said in a statement. "When our sub-publishing rights became available in North America, Michael [Gudinski, MMP founder] and I thought this was the right place for our writers."
Big Deal founder Kenny McPherson initially worked with Mushroom dating back to his days as president of Chrysalis Music Publishing.
R.E.M. Signs Performing Rights Deal With SESAC
-- CD Baby says it publishing administration service now represents 100,000 songwriters, with a catalog of over 625,000 songs. The company says it is on the verge of expanding to accepting songwriters from CD Baby artists in most European countries as well as Brazil, Israel, Mexico and Singapore, and will collect performance royalties via its relationship with performing rights organizations in those countries as well as the U.S.
Last year, CD Baby Publishing collected about $1 million for its songwriters, with big growth projected for the current year.
"The rapid growth of CD Baby's Publishing service is a testament to the huge swath of music creators that lack publishing deals, which results in their valuable royalties going uncollected," CD Baby vp of music publishing and rights management Jon Bahr said in a statement. "Our goal is to make sure all of the money generated from a song makes it to the songwriters."
CD Baby Publishing Administration uses technology and services from Downtown Publishing-owned Songtrust. Other services CD Baby offers songwriters and music users include its Sync Library, with 2 million pre-cleared songs.
Publishing Briefs: Music Reports Inc. Administered Over $500M in 2016
-- Music Reports Inc continues to expand beyond its music publishing roots. It has signed on to serve as the administrator in the going-forward portion of the Turtles' settlement with Sirius XM Radio, which covers 10 years of licensing for the pre-1972 master recordings of any member of the class action suit that opts in to receive payment.
That settlement ensured that members of the class action suit would receive a $25 million payout for past performances and included an agreement to a 10-year licensing deal that initially was valued at as much as $59 million -- based on the class members' pro-rata share of 5.5 percent of Sirius annual revenue -- in exchange for allowing Sirius to play the pre-1972 recordings. However, the payments going forward are dependent on whether the Turtles prevail in all three lawsuits in California, Florida and New York -- and the Turtles just lost the latter, which reduces the payout to 3.5 percent of revenue.
Meanwhile, the Garden City Group handles administration of the initial Sirius payout of at least $25 million.