Indie music services platform CD Baby is now providing publishing administration to more than 100,000 songwriters, the company announced today, alongside a major expansion into new territories.
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CD Baby announced to today that it is now representing more than 100,000 songwriters and 625,000 songs under its Publishing Administration service. The indie music services company is also expanding its publishing arm to 18 new countries.
Formed in 2013 under the branding CD Baby Pro, CD Baby Publishing allows a CD Baby songwriter to collect the royalties their songs generate worldwide. Recently, the publisher began allowing select songwriters to add songs that were not distributed by CD Baby.
CD Baby Publishing has uncovered royalties from key platforms like streaming services, but also more obscure sources like cruise ships, online piano lessons and airplane music. “Without CD Baby Pro Publishing, I wouldn’t have been able to get any of the mechanical royalties generated from each and every one of my over 45 million streams on Spotify,” said indie artist and songwriter Craig Cardiff.
CD Baby Publishing is currently available in Canada (SOCAN), Ireland (IMRO), United Kingdom (PRS) and United States (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC).
Major Expansion
This spring, CD Baby Publishing will expand to 18 new countries and begin accepting songwriters from most European countries and their respective territories as well as Brazil, Israel, Mexico and Singapore via direct relationships with each country’s Performing Rights Organization. The publishing expansion centers around the following relationships: Austria (AKM), Belgium (SABAM), Brazil (ABRAMUS only), Czech Republic (OSA), Denmark (KODA), Finland (TEOSTO), France (SACEM), Germany (GEMA), Greece (AEPI), Israel (ACUM), Mexico (SACM), Netherlands (BUMA), Norway (TONO), Portugal (SPA), Singapore (COMPASS), Sweden (STIM), Switzerland (SUISA) and Spain (SGAE).
“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,” comments CD Baby VP of Music Publishing and Rights Management, Jon Bahr. “Our goal is to make sure all of the money generated from a song makes it to the songwriters. We’ve proven that we can do this at the astounding scale of representing 100,000 songwriters, which is far beyond the size of any single publisher in the world.”
Beyond its Publishing Administration offering, which uses technology and services from Downtown Music Publishing-owned Songtrust, CD Baby distributes over 7 million songs to a wide range of digital services. The overall CD Baby platform has paid out over $500 million dollars globally to artists and songwriters.
In 2016, CD Baby launched a number of key initiatives, including real time trending for Spotify and Apple Music, integrated Cover Song Licensing within its distribution portal; the acquisition of the Loudr Distribution platform; the acquisition of Show.co artist marketing platform; and the launch of Soundrop Distribution with full cover licensing integrated.