The Ivors Academy is calling for an overhaul of the way streaming royalties are allocated after a new report estimates that songwriters and rightsholders are losing out on £500m a year globally due to poor data.

The Academy says royalties are unallocated or misallocated as a result of “poor, insufficient and conflicting data.” Unmatched streaming royalties are typically pooled and paid on a marketshare basis to songs that have already received payment through streaming, they say.

Graham Davies, Chief Executive of The Ivors Academy, has urgently called for “a new industry workflow based on new technologies and education of songwriters to close the data gap and ensure the right people are paid for their work.”

The Academy’s report also makes a number of recommendations:

Provide education to increase awareness and knowledge of creators of their rights and responsibilities. Specifically, the importance of ensuring timely registration of musical works and obtaining identifiers.
Use technology to enable the attachment of authoritative creator metadata to recordings at the point of creation to facilitate correct creator credits and accurate, timely royalty payments.
Establish industry-wide consensus on the minimum standards of metadata required before a music recording can be distributed and streamed.

“As streaming has grown to become the dominant method of listening to music, we have also seen the growth of the song-streaming data gap,” Davies concluded. “Poor, insufficient and conflicting data has created a massive global issue."