My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement, Part Deux

15 years ago this month, Tim posted a rant about the obviously unreliable digital royalty statement he had finally received from our old label after a couple of years of pestering them for it. The sad tale has continued since then, so he figured it was time for a recap of where things stand. What follows is a long read, so settle in if you’re interested.

On September 27th of this year, something I’d been trying to make happen since 2009 finally occurred: Warner Music Group sent my band, Too Much Joy, the first royalty payment we’ve ever received from them since signing to their label over thirty-four years ago, in 1990.

While the total amount ($770.91) was small in the grand scheme of things, the moral victory should have felt profound. So why am I still depressed about it?

Answering that question requires a brief rewind: fifteen years ago this month I published a piece on this website about how hard it had been to get Warner Brothers to send us a statement accounting for our digital royalties, and how laughably riddled with errors that statement had been when it finally arrived.

Because music streaming services were still relatively new at the time, and the rates they were paying the subject of so much controversy, that post, which I titled “My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement,” blew up. So many publications linked to it that the traffic to the post broke our website’s server within the first 12 hours; eventually I allowed Gizmodo and a couple other sites to repost the piece in full.

So you’d think maybe Warner Brothers would have been chastened by the publicity, and quickly rectified the issues.

Hahahahaha!

Rather than commemorating the end of a problem, that post became the start of a new one. Warner execs’ first response was trying to get me fired from my day job at Rhapsody, the subscription music service I worked for at the time. “You’re not getting fired,” my boss told me, “but they want your head. And we generally discourage employees from poking our content partners in the eye with sharp sticks.”

He said all this over the phone, so I can’t guarantee he was smiling in solidarity when he did, but he didn’t sound particularly angry, so that’s how I chose to hear it.

Eventually, Warner simply stopped sending me any royalty reports at all, which is a good way to make someone stop pointing out all the ludicrous falsehoods those reports contain, but a bad way to get him to shut up entirely.

I’ve spent the ensuing fifteen years struggling to get the blatant errors on that initial and most every subsequent statement addressed, and it’s only in the past few months they’ve kind-of sort-of been dealt with.

Though I have the kind of personality that enjoys tilting at the occasional windmill, I had actually given up on my fight with Warner Bros sometime last decade. Perhaps their accounting department took their own perverse glee in frustrating me – I can’t think of any other reason they suddenly sent me a royalty statement again in April of 2020. Especially since that statement looked like this:

That felt like a challenge, and since the pandemic lockdowns had begun just a few weeks earlier, one I suddenly had ample time to engage. I wrote them an email that began:

Today I received the first royalty statement in several years from Warner Music Group, for my old band, Too Much Joy. I’m not sure why one got sent now, after several years of silence, since I’ve lived in the same location for the past 23 years, but I appreciate it!

Anyway, the statement included a box that said, “For questions, contact us at Royalties@wmg.com,” so that is what I am doing. Here is my question:

Do you honestly expect me to believe our total earnings in the period 7/1/19 to 12/31/19 were $0.00? Because that seems laughably impossible.

They replied three days later:

We will reach out to the royalties department and have them look further into your below. Once we have gathered any and all information, we will be sure to let you know.

I guess it took them a while to gather any and all information, because I heard nothing again for two and a half years – and the new online royalty portal WMG had launched in the meantime never got updated with any other statements (which are supposed to appear every 6 months) in the interim. So I sent them a gentle reminder that my issues remained unresolved.

This time they wrote back in just 24 hours, telling me,

The royalty team has advised that they are working on fully remediating the account in question, as it was one of many accounts to migrate over from our old system not fully set up. Once they have everything finalized they will then be able to provide us with the up-to-date balance that is needed. We will be sure to keep you posted as they advise.

Three days later they followed up:

Hi Tom. We’re waiting on a response from the royalties team with regard to a timeline and I can understand your frustration – I can assure you that you certainly won’t have to wait another two years for statements. I’ve been following up with our royalties team quite frequently and I’m optimistic we’ll get this resolved hopefully before the next statement cycle.

They also provided me with an actual human contact named Max, who they said would be providing me updates going forward, which was so nice I forgave them for misspelling my name.

In retrospect, my reaction was akin to a mouse being happy when someone introduces him to the cat that will be his customer support contact, because this began a two year correspondence between me and Max that felt a lot like a game in which Max just kept testing how far he could push me before I started cursing at him in all caps:

• 9/15/22: Max promised me an update “soon.”
• 5/22/23 (8 months later, after I inquired again): Max wrote, “We should have those statements for you within the next few weeks.”
• 11/9/23 (24 weeks later, after hearing nothing and inquiring again): Max wrote, “it looks like the accounts have been brought current.” Unfortunately, they were still missing entire years’ worth of statements, and one of our albums did not appear in any of the periods that were provided. It was very hard maintaining a diplomatic tone when I typed all that up in my reply to Max, but I did my best.
• 1/19/24: Max wrote, “I’m looking into and trying to resolve this for you. Let me get back to you this coming week.”
• 6/13/24 (in response to an email I sent on 5/29/24 after hearing nothing for over 4 months): Max told me. “I assure you that this is still being looked into and remediated as expeditiously as possible. I should have an update for you in the coming week.”

I almost admire Max’s ability to keep promising me fixes “soon” to a problem that had already lasted over a decade, and which he would then ignore for however many months it took me to get on my donkey and charge his windmill once more. But any faceless corporation can do that kind of thing in its sleep. It takes deep reserves of evil incompetence to do the thing that really pissed me off: once TMJ’s most recent statement finally appeared in WMG’s online portal, it somehow showed that our unrecouped balance with Warner had increased by over $40,000!

We had not been signed to Warner Brothers since 1994. Needless to say, there is no way on earth my band could have incurred tens of thousands of dollars of additional expenses on Warner’s behalf. Equally needless to say, probably, but I still want you to know this: nowhere on the statement did WMG detail what charges had led to the increase.

In Max’s defense, he did finally answer one of the questions I’d been asking since 2009: our statements showed no activity at all for our second album, Son of Sam I Am, because,

Royalties we owe in connection with our exploitation of Son of Sam are paid to Alias Records pursuant to a license between Alias and Warner Records. It’s my understanding that Alias was the original label under which Son of Sam was released, and it’s from them that you should be getting any royalties you’re owed for that album.

Not sure why it took 15 years to communicate that simple fact, but the next part of Max’s answer made it clear Alias did not, in fact, have any data, let alone royalties to share with me: “From what I can tell,” Max went on, “we actually don’t currently have a proper contact for them. Do you happen to have that information? Whatever monies we have for them – to the extent there are any – are on hold.”

As I noted in my original 2009 piece about all this, Too Much Joy is unrecouped, which means we’re not actually owed any royalties until our share of each album/track sale has earned back about $360,000 (excuse me, now $407,000, somehow) that Warner spent recording, manufacturing and marketing the three records we made for them. It would be easy to assume that fact means complaining about missing or inaccurate royalty statements is pointless.

Easy, but very, very wrong. Because all the ridiculousness above suggests my band probably has a lower unrecouped amount than Warner claims, and even if the discrepancy isn’t massive enough that Warner was ever withholding checks they were otherwise obligated to write, if you multiply my experience by every other artist that has ever been signed to the label, the hidden amounts probably become pretty significant pretty quickly. The inability to get straight or timely answers from the accounting department is a feature, not a bug.

Which answers the question I asked way up at the top of this post, what seems like 4 years ago (thanks for sticking with me if you actually made it all the way down here!): I am not happy even though I finally got a $700 check from my old label because I have zero ability to gauge if it’s enough. It does not correlate to anything in the statements I can see, and even if it did I’d still have ample reason to suspect those statements were obfuscating reality rather than documenting it.

I got the check despite those royalty statements, not because of them. In 2022, Warner announced they would no longer apply unrecouped advances to artists who’d signed with them before 2000. That was a laudable decision (I tried to explain the inanity of recoupment in a footnote to my original post, so won’t repeat that diatribe here), and the other majors quickly followed suit. These are good things we should applaud, so I don’t want to spit on the impulse.

But the impulse is not as generous as it appears, if the label cannot provide accurate and timely accounts to its artists, and my Kafkaesque, fifteen-year journey to getting accurate and timely accounts has yet to reach a satisfying conclusion. How much has Son of Sam I Am earned since 2005? How much had our other albums earned prior to 2019? Why did it take the label 34 years to put $40,000 worth of charges from the ‘90s on our statements?

These questions remain unanswered, and make it impossible for me to maintain the tone of bemused knowingness I’m most comfortable with. Instead, I’m just royally pissed.

Because I’ve been building and administering digital royalty payment systems as part of my day job since the aughts, and I can tell you exactly how straightforward it is and how little time it takes to build one from scratch and run it accurately. At my current day job, we track and pay royalties to thousands of artists each and every month; I literally lose sleep if one of them fails to receive the proper amount, and personally ensure any such errors are dealt with as promptly as humanly possible.

Which doesn’t mean I expect everybody to treat strangers they encounter in their day jobs with such concern. But it does mean I have some authority with which to state that taking over four fucking years to deal with this crap on behalf of one of their artists is a morally indefensible failure on Warner Brothers’ part, even if they eventually sent me $700. 

It’s really not that hard to do the right thing, even when you work for a corporation. 

So why’s it seem so rare?