 My name is Tiara Guy and I'm the associate director of marketing operations on our industry engagement team here at Sound Exchange. And I'm excited to speak with you today about simplifying digital royalty solutions with Sound Exchange. I'm going to cover exactly what Sound Exchange is, who we cover, what we do, and the best way to maximize your revenue through our platforms using our features and tools in our online portal. So let's dive in. Now Sound Exchange has distributed nearly $9 billion in royalties since 2003. In just 2021 alone, we got a billion dollars out the door to creators and rights owners. We represent more than 570,000 different creators and we're growing every month. We're really proud to say that we've been able to match more than 90% of royalties as they come into the door directly to music creators. And we're able to do this within 45 days of receipt of that money. Sound Exchange covers over 3,600 different services who use the license that we administer and we have partnerships in over 50 different countries to help us to collect royalties overseas. As far as what particular royalty Sound Exchange covers, we're covering featured artists and sound recording copyright owners anytime they're streamed through cable internet or satellite radio. And it has to have that streaming component, which means it has to be non interactive and you can't be able to queue up exactly what you want to hear. So that'll cover series XM, Pandora, iHeartRadio, different music choice stations, several different services that you can view on our website that use that non interactive compulsory license. What we don't cover is on demand audio visual transmissions like your Apple Music, YouTube, Spotify, services where you can queue up exactly what you want to hear. So Sound Exchange is going to be non interactive in the digital space. As far as what particular copyright we cover, there are two copyrights that exist in every recorded song. There's the underlying music, which is the notes and the lyrics and then there's the sound recording, which is the permanent fixation of sounds. And Sound Exchange is going to be on the sound recording side. So the example that we like to use is RESPECT, which is written by Otis Redding, but made famous by Aretha Franklin's performance of the recording. So in this example, anytime this song is streamed, Otis is going to be collecting as the songwriter and the publisher through ASCAP, BMI or CSAC, and Aretha is going to be collecting as the featured artist through Sound Exchange. And then if she also owns the recording or if it's a record label, that would also be through Sound Exchange collecting as the sound recording copyright owner. Now, as far as how a dollar is split as it comes through our doors, 50% goes to the sound recording copyright owner, 45% goes directly to the featured artist, and then 5% of every recording that comes through Sound Exchange is sent to the unions, AFM SAG AFTRA for backup musicians, session players, regardless of if you've used them on your recording or not. That's across the board, according to the law that we operate under. So if you're an artist and you also own your recording that you were the featured performer on, you're going to be collecting 95% of that dollar that comes through the door. I also wanted to mention that royalties at Sound Exchange are retroactive for up to three years. So you want to make sure that you're registering and collecting under recordings as soon as possible so that you're not missing out on anything that you might be doing. Now, as far as that 5% as I mentioned that is being sent to AFM and SAG AFTRA, they have their own distribution process for those background session musicians. So Sound Exchange will send that money to them and then they will distribute it according to their process. So if you are a non featured artist or background vocalist session musician, you're going to want to go directly to that AFM SAG AFTRA website and sign up with them for their distribution process. Now the things that I'm going to cover today about Sound Exchange will touch on our reliable monthly payments. We do offer direct deposit and international wire that you are able to receive your payments monthly if you meet our minimum threshold. We do have turnkey membership, which means we represent the smallest artists, the largest artists all across the board. We are very transparent and want to make things as visual as possible for our members. So I'm going to cover our online portal and the ways that you can, you know, use our platform so that you don't have to call us for every single thing that you might need. So our technical expertise and how we're constantly trying to build new tools for the industry, such as an ISRC code database that didn't exist in our industry and so Sound Exchange built it and made it available to the public on our website, which you can access at any time. So as far as getting registered with Sound Exchange, the easiest, most efficient way is going to be through our online registration process. We also do offer this in Spanish, which is the most popular way to register with Sound Exchange. So as far as getting registered with Sound Exchange, the easiest, most efficient way is going to be through our online registration process. We also do offer this in Spanish. Now the online registration is not what you're going to want to use to update an account. And if you represent an heir or an estate, then you're not going to want to use the online registration either as we do require additional paperwork in those instances. But otherwise, the online registration is going to be the easiest way to register with Sound Exchange. Again, registration is free as a non-profit and it should only take you about 10 minutes if you have everything you need. You have a couple of different paths you can choose in registering with us if you're registering yourself or if you're registering on behalf of someone else. The major difference being that if you're registering someone else, we have a Sound Exchange authorization form in which the artist would have to sign off on authorizing you as a representative who can be filling out the registration for them. That being said, the registration still has to be payable to them as an individual or to a company that they wholly own. And then once you choose whether you're registering yourself or someone else, you'll be choosing if you're registering just as a performer, just as a Sound Recording Copyright Owner, or both. And again, as long as you have everything you need, if you know how you want to be paid, you know, physical check or direct deposit and having a government issued ID, and then a tax form or we have a tax form generator built in the online registration process if you want to submit that information to us. And so you should just be able to intuitively follow this process, but please reach out if there's anything you need through that process. Now, after you do submit a registration, it will roll into our membership step. And one of the largest benefits of becoming a member with Sound Exchange is that you're able to authorize us to collect international royalties on your behalf. So, you know, it's important to note that we're the largest global neighboring rights organization with over 20 years of experience on collecting international royalties. And we take care of registering contributions and repertoire on your behalf. And we do have one of the lowest overall admin rates in the industry in the world. And we're used by over 270,000 different performers, over 170,000 different rights owners to handle their neighboring rights. And so again, we have agreements in over 50 different countries, and we're covering 80% of neighboring rights markets outside the US. So when you do become a member with Sound Exchange, it's coupled with what we call our international mandate where you're able to let us know if you want us to collect for you internationally worldwide to encompass all the agreements that we have in place. Or you can tailor it and custom it to, you know, whichever territories you want us to collect or opt out of for your collection. So we make this very customizable to whatever you need as far as your global collections. And once you do register with us, you'll be given steps to create a login for our online portal, which is called Sound Exchange Direct or SX Direct. It's 24 seven self service. This is where you'll do your statements and breakdowns of your payments. You'll be able to add, you know, guests to view your account information. This is where you'll actually claim recordings, submit recordings, resolve overlaps, and all the different features that I'm about to kind of cover. So as far as who has access to this portal, there's one primary contact on every account at Sound Exchange. That primary contact has the ability to edit payment information, in addition to helping manage catalogs and claims and things like that. You can have up to 50 guests on the account. So it's very easy to add a guest. Once you're logged into the portal, you can just go to settings, guest list, add guests, and you'll be able to grant that guest different privileges, either view only, which is look but don't touch, or view with repertoire, which means that they can help submit claims and manage repertoire on behalf of that pay. So either the primary contact can add guests or the artists themselves can grant guest access to somebody other than their primary. If it's not them, they're authorized primary representative. When you log in to your dashboard, you'll be able to see the pays that you represent that are tied to that email address. And then one of the things that we've added is a membership summary, which is at the performer level. So when I say performer. It means the actual individual who or individuals who make up that artist entity so the artist entity being the, you know, alias or the band name, and the performers being the individuals who actually make up that band or alias. The membership is at that performer level. So while one member might say yes collect international royalties maybe the other does not want sound exchange to collect their international royalties. So you're able to view their status there, you're able to edit their status, and there's pieces of information like their birthday and things like that in order for us to claim effectively internationally. So we ask you to please make sure this information is correct and up to date, and that we have the right performers that make up that artist name. The other great thing about having this performer level is that it allows for performer based claiming. This is best for bands that may have had rotating lineups throughout the years on different albums. You're able to use the different performers to create lineups and then claim recordings based on those different lineups. So perhaps you have different lineups for different albums. This makes it a lot easier on the back end to be able to distribute those royalties to the appropriate members, once receiving the royalties. Another thing that we were able to add with the portal is in the past when you registered as an artist but maybe forgot to register as a sound recording copyright owner. You used to have to submit a whole new registration. But now we allow you if you're already registered as an artist to create a rights owner profile within the portal, so that you can claim recordings as a rights owner, in addition to as an artist as well. Maybe the reverse of that where if you're registered as a sound recording copyright owner, you can't just create an artist profile. In that case, you will need to be registered as an artist because we require a lot more information on the artist side. But we're really happy that we're able to at least provide our profile creation through the portal, instead of having to register the one of the best tools and most important for you to know and use is our search and claim tool. So all artists and rights owners are going to be able to claim recordings in our system so that we can ensure that they're linked for payment to your account. You're going to be able to search all the recordings in our system based on title artist is our C code or album, and it'll return results based on your search criteria, you'll be able to click through the recordings that you want to claim. Add them to the cart let us know what percentage you're claiming and submit those to us. We're going to be just a really effective tool and being able to do that. The search results are only going to return recordings that are already linked to your account for payment. Now rights owners are going to be able to do the same thing, however, in addition to the percentage that they're claiming on these recordings, we're going to ask for the date range, because obviously while a performer is always going to remain the same on a recording. As we know recordings can be bought and sold so the sound recording copyright owner isn't always going to be the same on that recording. So we're going to ask you for that date range of when you're claiming those recordings, is it inception to perpetuity and we, you know, provide those buttons, or is it for a specific period of time. You know this especially comes into effect when you're licensing recordings, and again buying and selling so that you can let us know exactly when you should be collecting and being able to give us that specific time range. We're also going to ask for an analysis step from the sound recording copyright owners. And basically what this means is providing us with metadata on those recordings that might be wrong or missing. And so you're able to kind of match it to other recordings that have a better version of that same recording that you can just match it to, or filling in missing metadata that we might not have. And this just allows us to have cleaner records and repertoire, you know, on your statements and things like that. A lot of people have questions about, you know, receiving a statement that has a recording that's misspelled. The important thing in that instance is that it is on your statement and you're getting paid for it regardless of a misspelling or mishap or missing piece of metadata. But you know as, as a lot of OCD people might say we want as clean, you know, data as we can get. And we find that that best version of metadata comes directly from the sound recording copyright owners. So we're going to ask you for any, you know, misspelled information or missing metadata when you're using search and claim. Now, you'll know that a recording is linked for payment to your account already under associated recordings. You're going to see how many associated recordings you have, and then you can click to drill down so you can actually see that metadata for each recording. If you are to claim a recording in search and claim, you'll know it's processed because it'll show up in associated recordings. If you then go back to search and claim for the same recording, it shouldn't show up in the search criteria anymore. So we do recommend that you use that search and claim tool, at least on a quarterly basis to see if anything is slipping through the cracks and isn't already linked to your account for payment. So you'll want to do a general search every now and then to make sure you're claiming everything effectively, and then nothing is slipping through the cracks. Now going back to sound recording copyright owners, in addition to wanting the best version of metadata, we also like to receive the metadata directly from them. Obviously services are going to be reporting to us what they're streaming and sending us the royalties for those reports. But again, we find that the best metadata comes directly from the sound recording copyright owners. So we do ask that labels and rights owners are submitting that metadata to us, letting us know what percentage you're claiming, and we have a special tab in Sound Exchange Direct for you to do that. You can use this in-app version where you're just submitting metadata for one or two releases at a time, or we have a bulk upload feature where you'll be using essentially a spreadsheet to upload. Maybe it's hundreds and thousands of different recordings and metadata that you can upload all at once, and you can have a history of your upload and be able to access what you've submitted. So we really hope that you'll use that tool, and this is what we use to build the ISRC database that we're able to make public for everybody to be able to access this metadata on different recordings. The other tool that we're able to offer is overlaps and disputes, specifically for sound recording copyright owners in the portal. Disputes get a lot more complicated, and so we do have an artist resolution team that handles all of the mediation for those disputes, but unfortunately it's not something we're able to offer in the portal at this time. But we are able to offer it for sound recording copyright owners. And we have found that this has effectively resolved so many different overlaps and disputes, as we're able to visually provide you with a look at what the overlap is, who is it with. We allow you to edit your claim if it's a percentage issue if it's a date range overlap that's the issue. You're able to like in real time see what the issue is on that recording. And we have a process where basically you have 90 days to either relinquish your claim, maintain your claim or edit it maybe you do have the date range a day or two off on your time range of when you're collecting maybe it is a percentage issue. That was slightly off that you just need to correct. You have 90 days to respond to that if you don't respond unfortunately you automatically relinquish. And if you really didn't mean to maintain that claim you'd have to reclaim it and start that process again. But both, both parties or if it's multiple parties that have the overlap or dispute on that same recording have that 90 day window to respond and edit or maintain their claim. If you edit it and it equals out to 100% then it's resolved and the parties get paid appropriately and will make any credits or debits needed. If you both maintain the overlap, because you believe that your claim is correct and right and it's still overlaps with another claimant. We will place the recording on hold and provide contact information to both claimants for the other, and we ask you to work it out and let us know how it should pay out otherwise the recording remains on hold. But we have found again that this is just effectively resolved so many different issues. You receive automatic weekly emails from sound exchange reminding you if you have any recordings in overlap or dispute, which allows you to take action if the balls in your court in that particular 90 days. And so we have just found that this has been such a great tool in helping getting more money out the door. Finally, I wanted to touch on letters of direction as we get questions about this all the time. Sound exchange will honor a letter of direction which allows a featured artist to allocate a percentage of their royalty to a creative affiliate on a recording, a producer, a mixer or an engineer, where they're able to allocate a percentage for particular recordings to that creative affiliate. And so they'll do that using a letter of direction. And so sound exchange has kind of honored this process of letters of direction for a while, but it was then kind of codified into law with the passage of the Music Modernization Act. And so letters of direction have to be signed by the artist as it is their royalty that they're allocating. And then the letter of direction can be retroactive for up to three years, and serves as a way for us to create an account for that creative participant for that producer mixer engineer, so that they can get access from sound exchange and have portal access. That being being said that creative participant can't use the search and claim tools to claim recordings directly. Anything that they're receiving as a producer mixer engineer has to be stated on that letter of direction in order for them to get paid. So it's also important to note that if the recording is a collaboration between multiple featured artists, you would want to get letters of direction from each featured artist that's on that track in order for that creative participant to receive their full percentage on that recording. So please make sure you're using the most up to date letters of direction that are available on our website. And please let us know if you have any additional questions, we do have a guide to how to fill these out and the proper pieces of information we need in order for them to pay out. And you can also view active letters of direction in the portal, you know what you're paying out for melodies or what you're receiving from melodies. So we're happy to be able to offer that as well. So, in summation, we're really excited about you being involved with sound exchange, whether it's registering directly with us becoming a member, or just getting connected and signing up for our newsletters and our social channels to get, you know details about things that are in our industry in general or events that sound exchanges having advocacy process industry news. You know, sound exchanges headquartered in Washington DC and so we do a lot of advocacy and pushes for legislation that help our creators and just advocate for mainly the adoption of the American Music Fairness Act. So that's a lot that we're doing, we would love your support, you know, for speaking out to different legislative leaders and, you know, pushing that legislation that will resolve in higher rates for our creators. And we just really want you to participate with us and interact with us, again joining us for events meeting us out at conferences or festivals that we might be at. And we're just really excited about working with you getting as many royalties as we can into your hands and making it as simple and, you know, efficient and fair as possible. So, thank you so much and please always feel free to reach out to sound exchange for anything you might need. And we really hope that you're able to take advantage of all these tools and features and just working with us to make the industry better every day. So thank you so much.