Cooking Vinyl launches new venture to solve royalties conundrum

Rights holders are struggling: many independent labels and publishers are drowning in the mountains of data that are being sent by streaming services on a regular basis, and many don’t have the resources to create a dedicated infrastructure to compute said data, which means that they are essentially unable to verify the royalties received.

To solve this very problem Cooking Vinyl has launched a brand new business called the Music Royalty Co (MRC), which it co-owns.

The business is a joined venture with Ray Brush (ex Finance Head at Essential) and he will be heading the business. MRC will be relying on third party company Counterpoint for its royalty software.

The website states that the services provided include:
- Royalty Processing
- Copyright Management and Registrations
- Analytics & Sales Solutions

Obviously it would not make much sense if the business was created purely to serve Cooking Vinyl and Essential, so while those businesses will be the core of MRC’s customer base at the company has already signed up Loose Music and R&S Records external clients and - judging by the widespread nature of the problem - should not have too much trouble finding more interested labels pretty quickly if it can deliver on its promise and the price point is viable.

(Andrea Leonelli)