There are many problems with the music industry. We usually hear about how artists are being exploited and how they are kept on “slave” contracts. But rarely do we hear about the plights of songwriters and composers. These people are generally out of the limelight but they are no less important in the process of creating a hit song.

It Is Time To Completely Rethink How Songwriters Get Paid

The way songwriters and composers make money is from royalties. If a song gets played on the radio or licensed for a film or downloaded from iTunes, you get a very small percentage of that money. Just to emphasize how miniscule that amount is, Kevin Kadish wrote an article titled “My Song Was Played 178 Million Times and I Was Paid $5,769”. That works out to about $0.000032 each time the song was played.

However the problem does not lie solely with the streaming platforms. The biggest culprits are in fact the label companies. In the US, mechanical royalties are set at 9.1 cents per download. A big chunk of this goes to the music label while the remaining amount gets split among all the various songwriters.

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You Can Have a Hit Tomorrow, But You Won’t Get Paid Until Six Months Later

Another problems is that it is virtually impossible to predict how and when you will receive your money. Say you do create a song that is successful. But you won’t see that payout for a long time, because it takes months for the song to get recorded, released, and finally played. The industry average is about six months but wait times have been known to take even longer. Sometimes you can get an advance from a music publishing company, where they’ll front you the money so you can actually work.

Machi X to Right the Ship

Machi X hopes to change all this by tokenizing intellectual properties and helping songwriters and composers take out the middle man. By digitizing the rights and putting it on the blockchain, royalties can be recorded and paid out in a timely fashion. You also prevent a huge chunk from going to music labels and instead can have it go directly to the songwriters themselves.