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In an era when music use has exploded around the globe, today's average publishers still practice passive copyright administration, depending on a traditional network of collection societies, record companies and other payment sources for reliable accounting.
Unfortunately, as many of the major societies have seen their catalogs and transactions balloon while maintaining or often reducing staff, accountings have proven less trustworthy and payments are often diminished and usually unchallenged. We have found that without aggressive and focused oversight of all streams of royalty income, songwriters relying on their own limited resources as well as accountants and lawyers, unfocused independent collection arms or bloated multinational publishers are chronically underpaid.
Spirit's copyright department, expert in the push-the-envelope caretaking of classic copyrights is widely recognized as one of the most thorough in the business. At the start of each publishing relationship, we launch a comprehensive global clean-up of a catalog's copyrights, including a verification of registrations and payments from all sources and territories and an analysis of all existing licenses and cue sheets.
The company's administration team has recovered for our clients hundreds of thousands of dollars in suspense monies, previously unlicensed or uncollected mechanicals and renegotiated license fees. Further, by utilizing an extremely aggressive proprietary system to track and analyze the collection and payment of current performance, mechanical and sync income - creating, in essence, an ongoing audit - we are in a position to substantially increase our clients' royalty income on an ongoing basis.
Indeed, our global affiliates - similarly respected and fully networked in their territories - are also uniquely equipped to ensure highest payments from performing rights and mechanical organizations and their record in identifying black box monies (hidden pockets of unclaimed royalties) is excellent. Further, our global creative staff is similarly superb, and have been responsible for numerous local covers and new sync activity.
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