Wigan borough band Lottery Winners supports new guide helping songwriters to get paid

UK music industry experts and the Government have identified a gap in knowledge on music data – sometimes referred to as metadata – as a cause for concern among artists, as it could see them losing out on royalties.

PRS for Music, The Ivors Academy, the Music Publishers Association and the Intellectual Property Office have now come together to launch the Get Paid Guide.

It aims to empower songwriters and composers to take control of their royalties and learn how to manage their music data correctly.

While organisations like PRS for Music ingest data and pay out royalties based on data input, songwriters and the teams supporting them have to include the right data to enable accurate payments.

The Get Paid Guide addresses this with short tutorials, a checklist for managing music data and help with frequently asked questions, including demystifying data and knowing what to do when covering another artist’s song or using pseudonyms, for instance.

This has been supported by Leigh-based Lottery Winners, who topped the charts in May with album Anxiety Replacement Therapy.

They said: “There’s no more special feeling than when something you’ve created gets played and heard.

"Songs can be so personal and I feel privileged every time one is unleashed into the world.

"That is not to say that songwriting doesn’t involve a lot of hard work and dedication – it does. The only way for me to be able to dedicate myself to that and have it as my actual job is through royalties. It would be senseless to lose out on royalties because of missing data, which is why the Get Paid Guide and its message is so important to songwriters like me.”

David Humphries, head of research at the Intellectual Property Office, said: “Education and awareness of the importance of music metadata is crucial to improving the quality of the data, and it is important that creators can access the knowledge and information they need to take ownership of their data.”