Boutique game soundtrack record label. We create, manage, and protect some of the most popular video game soundtracks, piano collections & vgm covers albums.
Seattle, WA
Joined July 2015
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You're right - it's absolutely an imperfect system, with not enough parties to advocate for gamemusic rights.
Most other companies in the rights admin/fingerprinting space stay far away from publishing administrator... understandably.
We're still hopeful for competition.
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It's for ... both; an entangled mess more jumbled than the source code for VVVVVV. (with love @/terrycavanagh)
Due to the Indie Game Composer Exception, YouTube doesn't know first uses, so YouTube uses popular covers to find melodies in uploads, and matches those.
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Ahh that is precisely what is happening here! An indie composer who creates their own soundtrack wears the hats of:
- Producer
- Recording artist
- Composer/Songwriter
- Publisher/Administrator
- Record label
There are distinct royalties, and responsibilities, for each.
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To put 7 years of numbers into perspective, from the label/sound recording side: YouTube is less than 7% of our revenue. Spotify continues to lead the streaming wars.
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2. (con'td) Between Art Tracks, sound recording claims, and monetized uploads (for unlicensed/non-claimed/unmanaged copyrights), recording artists have variety of ways to collect sound recording shares via distributors and MCNs.
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2. Materia Music Publishing only collects music publishing (sync/perf/mech/lyric) on YouTube. These are royalties exclusively allocated to composition rights holders. (cont'd)
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1. (b.) bad actors. We have resolved 100+ cases of people reuploading original UNDERTALE music as theirs. That metadata stays in the system, and takes years to purge.
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1. (a.) Because cover songs. Distributors deliver metadata to YouTube, PROs deliver to YouTube. Each party wants its share for a recording.
Here's a partial metadata sheet that PROs have provided for a popular MEGALOVANIA cover. Materia is the only display party.
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Nice questions. It's a generalization, so how about "Indie composers who retained the copyrights to their sound recording and music publishing copyrights CANNOT deliver their soundtracks to Content ID via an MCN or distributor and WILL NOT get paid by YouTube."
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On the music publishing (musical work) side, content and metadata arrive on services via PROs, distributors, broadcasters, individual uploaders, and other types of interested parties.
It's up to each party to set correct claims and policies for a type of right, for a territory.
We're calling this the Indie Video Game Music exception: larger rightsholders of franchises remain unaffected, in part due to nonparticipation in music industry defaults.
Who is affected are independent composers who retain their rights. Platforms do not allow them to get paid.
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It absolutely gets confusing, if only for the misnomer "publisher" between game and music industries.
On the distribution (sound recording) side, many fingerprinting services will allow video game music to be submitted, or require monetization to be disabled.
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It's a great idea -- one of many we've deliberated with our partners, distributors, subpublishers, and administrators over the years.
Ultimately, there's enough invalid/incomplete metadata out there, and we'd rather focus our efforts in resolving it, not adding to it.
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Leniency in claim/monetization policies isn't relevant when balancing multi-national matrices of usage rights for sync, mechanical, perf across platforms and PROs.
E.g., here's all the intl claimants for one Undertale cover. Our job is fixing the bad data.
(and they're not 🤘)
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You and us both, since 2015.
Content ID does not allow first uses (soundtracks) for video game music, as per their OST exception: support.google.com/youtube/a…
That gets complicated when music societies share cover song metadata, which become the basis of melody matching.
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For example, here's the rights for *one* cover song, and it's international matrix of rights holders.
That's *per* sound recording group, *per* recording, per *musical work*, per *platform*.
Much of our work in rights administration and licensing occurs behind the scenes.
UNDERTALE is a phenomenon and exception to both game and music industries, and neither has the infrastructure to support a balance the creator ecosystem and rightsholders, so we're building that.
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Materia has worked with YouTube and dozens of other platforms since 2015 to *proactively* facilitate community creativity, cover songs, and clearance.
That means helping YouTube license and match sound recording and music publishing right for literally 100m+ videos.
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We remember an era where YouTube removed content due to unavailable rights, licenses; or at instruction of music publishers and labels.
Many rights holders still take this approach. One of our goals is to prevent that, and protect both the creator ecosystem and rightsholders.
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