I recently commented on an article at CD Baby which is a business set up to resell independent artists’ music to consumers. Their article mentioned how musicians should sign their music to performing rights societies to collect earnings from licenses for use in businesses as background music.

However the reality is very different for independent artists.

Performing rights organisations simply make the best guess they can on what is being played within hundreds of thousands of businesses to distribute the net earnings of licenses. They make an assumption that the top popular artists are most likely being played and pay them the majority of the earnings.

So if a smaller independent artist even knows their music is being played in a local retail store for example it won’t make much of a difference because there isn’t a way to feed back accurate usage reports.

The best thing artists can do if they want to earn from background music is to deal with a business such as Melody Pods who can be sure of where their music is used for valuable commercial
background music usage.