Loudr

Technology integration provides access to high-volume electronic matching against the Library of Congress database of registered musical works

Loudr is announcing the launch of its data integration with the U.S. Copyright Office, making it possible for Section 115 licensees to conduct an automated search of the most historically significant digital database of music copyright records in the United States. 

Significantly, the development makes statutory licensing a more cost-effective compliance option for companies seeking to clear publishing rights for digital music streams or downloads. Licensees may secure a Section 115 license by filing a notice of intent (NOI) with the Copyright Office for a filing fee of $75, plus a fee of $20 for each batch of 10 additional songs or, under the new reduced-cost electronic filing process announced in 2016, a fee of $10 for each batch of 100 songs. However, in order to take advantage of the digital filing, a licensee must establish eligibility by matching sound recordings against USCO-registered musical works, and submitting NOIs for works not listed. 

For companies vying to offer their subscribers on-demand access to millions of tracks, Section 115 licenses often offer the only practical means of securing a license for so-called "long tail" catalogs. To address the issue of licensing music for which rights holders cannot be identified or located, Loudr identifies compositions in sound recording metadata, matches compositions to Library of Congress digital registration records, and systematically generates, batches, and files compliant NOIs with the Copyright Office on behalf of its clients. 

Loudr has ingested and indexed the full digital archive of registration records from the Copyright Office, and will continue to ingest data as the Library of Congress archive grows. Supplemented by Loudr's own database of music publishing and copyright data, the digital registration records will be leveraged to support Loudr licensing operations, which offer clients the ability to rely on direct licenses, statutory licenses, or a combination thereof. 

"We aim to help our clients make the most of any change in the licensing landscape," said Loudr CEO Chris Crawford. "We are excited to support the Copyright Office's recent shift to accommodate the speed and scale of digital music." 

About Loudr 

Technology enhancements helped drive growth in 2016, which accounted for more than half the payouts to date

Loudr® announced today that its mechanical licensing and administration business has distributed over $1 million in royalties to music publishers worldwide over the last few years.

Following the sale of their digital distribution business to CD Baby earlier this year, Loudr has focused on solving the problem of how to identify and pay music publishers, songwriters, and other rights holders based on current song ownership. To accomplish this, the San Francisco-based team has developed a technology platform that leverages music rights metadata to map sound recordings to compositions, identify rights holders, and issue royalty payments and statements to songwriters and publishers.

The platform is available to Loudr business clients seeking to secure licenses, as well as those seeking to meet royalty reporting obligations or make one-time or recurring payments to rights holders. It is also available to artists, labels, and creators who use Loudr Licensing, the company’s a la carte cover song licensing platform which is open to anyone who wants to purchase a license. “Loudr’s goal is to provide infrastructure to address rights and royalties in the real world,” said Loudr CEO Chris Crawford. “Since we’re well past the brick-and-mortar era of music distribution, it’s important to make sure that the systems for paying creators and rights holders keeps up with the pace of digital music.”  

Of the more than $1 million dollars paid out by Loudr to thousands of musicians and rights holders over the past few years, more than half has been distributed in 2016. Crawford credits the milestone to enhanced data matching algorithms, as well as the company’s growing roster of licensing and royalty administration clients.

Loudr plans to increase the pace in 2017 by investing in data science, providing analytics to its clients, and leveraging additional data sources, including ongoing deliveries from major and independent publishers and digital works registration data from the U.S. Copyright Office. In 2016, the company entered several partnership with international music distributors to disburse US mechanical royalties, including a partnership with Warner-backed Zebralution. The company's music metadata matching and royalty administration tools have also garnered interest from a variety of digital service providers, from streaming music services to video platforms.

Any musician or copyright holder can sign up to receive digital licensing notices and claim any payable royalties from Loudr by emailing [email protected] or visiting http://loudr.fm/publishers.

About Loudr

Dear Artists, Arrangers, Producers, and Friends,

Earlier this week you received an email about the upcoming transition from Loudr to Soundrop. I'd like to follow up to provide some background on Soundrop, as well as answer some questions you may have about how this change might affect you.

Soundrop is a new platform designed by the CD Baby team. Inspired by the core distribution offerings that are important to Loudr artists, Soundrop brings new features and monetization options to your existing catalog and future releases.

Here's what's staying the same:

A centralized dashboard to review sales information and view royalty payments

Built-in cover song licensing and ongoing publisher administration for those sales

The ability to split revenue with other contributors upon request

Delivery to iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google, and Deezer

No upfront distribution fees for original or pre-licensed content

Your releases will be automatically migrated to Soundrop without redelivery to stores. This means that your artist profiles, ratings, rankings, followers, and indexes will remain the same across music platforms.

Important upcoming changes:

A new cover song licensing model that charges a one-time fee for clearance, rather than an ongoing higher percentage deduction.

Automatic disbursement options when a payment threshold is met

Additional monetization opportunities and access to more stores

Analytics and data visualizations

Discontinuation of the Loudr direct store

Some of the new features will appear at launch; others will roll out over 2017. Please note that the last day to submit content via Loudr Alpha will be December 4th, 2016. During the Soundrop account migration process, you may experience non-submission window of up to 10 days starting December 5th. Please plan holiday releases accordingly.

While the Loudr team is no longer involved in the distribution of your music to stores, we are still powering mechanical licensing and royalty administration for your cover songs. The opportunity to focus on publishing rights in a data-intensive industry has enabled us to speed up the cover song licensing process from an average of two weeks to an average of two days. As part of this work, we're also pleased to have paid out more than $1,000,000 in payments to songwriters and music publishers.

As part of this work, we will be sunsetting our direct download store to focus on building additional tools for songwriters and music publishers. It was not an easy decision for us to close something that we put a lot of time and passion into over the years, but we do believe that this enables us to initiate changes and make moves that will benefit songwriters for years to come.

At some point in the next few weeks, you'll receive an invite that will give you priority access to the new Soundrop platform. In the meantime, I'd like to thank you for your patience with this transition and wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

Sincerely,

Hello Artist,

We have an important announcement to share with you. For those of you who might not have the time to get through the long version, here is a quick summary. For those of you who would like to learn more about these changes, please keep reading!

The Short Version

▪ In an effort to focus our resources on songwriters and music licensing, Loudr has teamed up with CD Baby to take on Loudr's digital music distribution business, making it possible for our team to wholly focus to the licensing business that has always set us apart from other music companies.

▪ Loudr aims to make the transition a smooth one, so we're supporting the CD Baby team as they start working with Loudr artists directly.

▪ You can still access the Loudr distribution experience through Music Manager at this time, and in the near future should expect to see new features and tools, as well as access to way more stores.

▪ Loudr will still be here powering the licensing each time you submit a cover song for the distribution platform, and paying royalties to music publishers each time you sell a cover song.

▪ You can contact [email protected] if you have questions about any of the changes to come.

▪ For a more thorough explanation, please read on.

The Longer Version

This is a little about the past, but mainly about what the future holds for us, as we continue forward - a bunch of musicians with a crazy dream of changing the industry of music for the better.

Team Loudr has been around in various incarnations since 2009, and in that time we’ve boldly gone into uncharted corners of the Internet with you, our faithful and inspiring artists. Most of you remember when the Loudr store got its most recent facelift last year. Many in the VGM community will recall the Game Music Bundles on Loudr (and before that on Bundle Dragon). Those in the YouTube crowd will remember when we were calling ourselves re:discover songs, and before that Joypad Records. Our mouth-musicians will remember our original incarnation as A Cappella Records, a project that was started out of a dorm room in our college days. We’ve come a long, long way in the past seven years, and you’ve been with us every step of this journey.

Since the beginning, Loudr has operated in two very different worlds. On the one hand we’ve worked as a digital music distributor, helping artists get recordings onto digital stores. On the other, we’ve built a powerful licensing engine to allow creators to legally distribute cover songs and to allow songwriters to be paid their fair share of the royalties for those songs. Working in these two very different business areas has been challenging, and we’ve often felt that we could do more for music by focusing on the things that truly set us apart. As the main person behind Loudr support, I think I’m in a unique position to speak to this - I’ve communicated with almost all of you by email, on the phone, or in person. I’ve even jammed with a handful of you when our paths have crossed!

The Loudr wolf is top dog when it comes to licensing. We have great relationships with a growing number of songwriters and music publishers, and we'd like to help the business of music get to a place where talented songwriters can make a viable living off their craft - something which is uncertain these days. When it comes to distribution, there are companies who have chosen to focus all their efforts toward that goal and who do it really, really well.

We deeply respect and appreciate that you, our artists, have always stuck by us, but we also know that our distribution platform could benefit from improvements. Almost all of our artists have had the experience of dealing with that one album that just doesn’t look the way it should on a particular store and needs to be manually changed. (I should know - I’ve done most of those changes!) At present, Loudr sends music to six outlets, and while we often get requests to add additional outlets and services, we’ve been unable to do so due to limited resources.

Back in the early days when we got our start in digital distribution by working with a cappella artists, we looked at other companies in the space and picked up a great deal of wisdom from the DIY Musician blog, a resource that remains relevant to this day. That blog introduced us to the concept of mechanical licensing, and that license eventually became the backbone of our efforts in the rights space, enabling us to secure many of the same rights for indie artists that a major label would secure for its artists.

Over the past year, we've had the opportunity to get to know CD Baby, the company behind the DIY Musician blog, and have had some great conversations with their team about the business of digital music distribution. When CD Baby extended an offer to help manage and grow the Loudr distribution business, we saw it as an opportunity to better support our artists and said yes. CD Baby will be stepping into our distribution shoes, taking on the business of getting albums on stores and supporting Loudr artists directly. This means that our artists will gain access to proven distribution tools, new features that many of you have requested, and ultimately way more stores. It also means that the Loudr team will be wholly shifting its focus to the licensing and royalty reporting that has always set us apart from other music companies and which has the potential to fundamentally change the way songwriters are compensated for their creative works.

In the short term, not a whole lot is changing. It’s going to take some time for us to get the CD Baby team acquainted with your music and our systems, as we are committed to making the transition a smooth one. We’ll keep you informed as new features are added and processes are improved, and look forward to seeing Loudr artists benefit from the knowledgeable support of the CD Baby team.

On a personal note, one of the things that WILL be changing is that I won’t be fielding day-to-day distribution support anymore. I was originally brought onto ACR (back in 2010!) to do licensing, and I’m going to return to coordinating licensing strategy with our research and data teams. One of my last jobs as the support person for distribution is to make sure that CD Baby's support team has everything they need to support you. As always, if you have any questions, you can contact [email protected].

It has been an honor to work directly with so many of you, and I will truly miss those interactions. If you'd like to keep in touch with me, please feel free to get in touch with me. I won’t be able to replace the sound files for your new album, but that doesn't mean I won't want to throw it on and rock out to it!

Hey Loudr Artists,

It has been incredibly exciting to watch our community of artists, songwriters, and creators grow along with Loudr. Over the past year, many of you have shared with us your feedback, much of which channels a recurring theme: more licensing options for cover songs.

You asked, and we listened. Today we're excited to announce the launch of Loudr Licensing, which expands our cover song licensing feature to support additional media, as well as licensing outside the Loudr distribution ecosystem. If you want to press a cover song to vinyl, sell it on BandCamp, legally offer streams on SoundCloud or seek distribution options beyond Loudr, you can now purchase a mechanical license for a flat service fee of $15, along with the cost of publisher royalties.

Quick Facts About Loudr Licensing:

What the licenses cover: Your ability to release cover songs as physical CDs, digital downloads*, ringtones, and interactive streams.

What you can do with your music: Sell your music at the price you want, or give away promotional copies -- as many copies as you've specified in your license request.

How much the licenses cost: $15 service fee per song + the cost of royalties, which range from 1 cent per stream to 9 cents per digital download. View full pricing details here.

When the licenses expire: Never.

*When you use Loudr to distribute your cover songs to our partnered digital stores, you don't need to purchase upfront licenses for the stores you select. We deduct the publisher royalties from each sale.

Loudr Artists,

We’d like to notify you of an important change to our digital distribution services.

As you may know, Loudr offers artists the option to distribute their music through other digital stores, including iTunes, Google Play, Spotify and others. We work directly with Apple to deliver music to iTunes, and had partnered with an outside distribution service to reach other stores. However, based on feedback we've received from our artists, we've made the decision to move away from this outside service in the interest of shorter submission times, better control over distribution options, and more favorable terms for our artists.

Loudr already delivers music to some of the most popular digital retailers - iTunes and Pandora, with Google Play and Spotify coming in mid-March. As we evaluate additional services, we aim to add the stores that benefit our artists the most, and want to hear from you if you’d like to suggest a retailer not already on the horizon.

We feel strongly that artists should have as much direct control as possible over all aspects of their music careers, and will be listening as we continue to grow our distribution network.

If you have any questions or concerns about how this change affects you and your music, please contact us at [email protected].

Tell us additional distribution options you want as a Loudr artist by filling out our online artist survey. Note: You are not required to answer all questions and may skip to Question 5 to address specific distribution services.

Thanks for getting Loudr with us, Your Team @ Loudr

FAQ

How does Loudr decide what stores it will distribute to?

You spent a lot of time and money making your records, so the decision to send your music to any store is one that we take seriously.

We try to weigh factors like financials (whether you'll make money) and audience potential (whether you'll get new fans), with the feedback that we get from you. Generally we want to send your music to stores where you'll get the most benefit, and avoid sending your music to stores that don't have a sustainable business model.

I only sell my music on the Loudr website. Does this affect me?

No, it does not. But if you ever do decide to use Loudr to send your music to other platforms like Google Play or Spotify, this will be relevant.

I asked to have my music sold through these stores, but the distribution hasn't gone through yet. What does this mean for me?

Bear with us: this means your music will go live as soon as possible. When it goes live, it will be sent by Loudr to the stores directly, which means no middlemen, more control over content, and better royalties for you.

I didn't realize that I could use Loudr to send my music to iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and Pandora. Can I go back and have you send my music out to those additional distributors?

Sure! Just send us an email at [email protected] and let us know which of those additional stores you'd like your music on.

My music is currently being sold through Loudr on iTunes. Does this affect me?

Nope! We already work directly with iTunes.

My music is currently made available through Loudr on Spotify, Google Play and other stores. How does this affect me?

Your music will continue to be available through Spotify and Google Play as of mid-March, although it is possible that any store URLs may change. Your music will not be available through other distributors we do not have direct relationships with.

What additional distributors can Loudr send my music to as of today?  We currently distribute to iTunes and Pandora, and will be adding Spotify and Google Play in mid-March. We'll continue to pursue relationships with the most popular stores.

UPDATE 09.19.2014 : See our page dedicated to Loudr branding and assets

Many of our friends - artists, reviewers, and fans alike - have asked us about Loudr logos and buttons for use on their websites. A few artists have even gone ahead and made beautiful Loudr logos of their own (which we think is AWESOME!), but we'd like to make things as easy on everyone as possible.

One of the most amazing things about building a platform is putting it all out there and seeing what happens. 

  We couldn't be certain what to expect when we launched Loudr on March 1, 2013. How many people will sign up? What kind of music will populate? How many people will choose to support artists directly?

  In the ensuing months, we've been thrilled to discover that there was indeed a need for Loudr in the world of music creation, collaboration, and distribution. Artists have been able to use Loudr to manage the business administration that comes with making and sharing music, from cover song licensing to collaborator pay-splits to accounting. We're excited to empower amazing artists like Alaa Wardi, Peter Hollens, Smooth McGroove and over 1,000 more. Loudr's 50,0000 supporters have really been showing the love: thanks to their support we've been able to generate $1,000,000 for talented artists.

  This is just the beginning for Loudr! 

Ready to join the pack? We live here: www.loudr.fm 

  That's several kinds of thousands, so we've also summarized everything in a fun, attractive bundle of visual joy: 

The wait is over, and artists and fans alike now have direct access to music distribution platform Loudr. We'll continue iterating and hacking to add new features (and we have more than a few good ones up our sleeves), but in the meantime, Team Loudr is proud to enable all artists (whether makers of original music, soundtracks, or cover songs) to release their music when they want to and how they want to. 

How To Claim Your Space On Loudr

To claim your space on Loudr, create a new account in one of three ways (you'll be able to add the other accounts later if you want):

The ol' email/password combination 

Connect with your Twitter account 

Connect with your Facebook account

Create Your Account Now

Follow Artists

Keep track of your favorite artists (and let your favorite artists know that you care) by following them. When you purchase music on Loudr, you'll start following that artist. You can also click the Follow Artist button on any Loudr artist page.

Release Music of Your Own

Got an album ready to go? Log in to your account and click Become An Artist. You'll automatically be granted access to Loudr Alpha, where you can upload everything needed to release and sell your music, whether on your own Loudr storefront, on iTunes or beyond.

Coming Very Soon

We're polishing the knobs and hammering out the creases in the new artist dashboard before we lovingly release it to you. In the meantime though, we invite you to share your thoughts on the current Loudr experience, both as an artist and as a music listener. You can reach us at [email protected] or suggest and vote on new features on our Uservoice.

For those about to rock, we salute you.

It's been a month since our last blog post, and we would not be surprised if you asked yourself "Hey, I wonder what the Loudr team is up to? Maybe they spend all their time eating cake and go-karting"

It's a valid criticism. We do love cake and go-karts. And hacking. 

As you've probably seen from the Loudr homepage, bold new changes are underfoot. We're terribly thrilled to share the first two complete pages of our new design. If you're already on Loudr, one of these brand new pages is yours.

THE HOMEPAGE

The new and improved Loudr homepage is lighter, bolder and clearer than our previous design. It's also packed with features: 

• Fan highlights for those of you who take supporting bands very seriously and think it should be a full-contact sport 

• Organic album recommendations based on how you interact with Loudr

• A "What is Loudr" section (affectionately referred to as the GothCorner™)

As we continue building tools to help fans and artists interact (read: party with each other), we'll keep updating the site and posting here with notes on our progress.

THE ARTIST PAGE

Loudr is nothing without its artists - they're the reason we're all here. With that in mind, we've completely overhauled the Artist Page with the goal of making it an artist's most useful page, Internet-wide.

As of today, we're giving artists direct support for:

• Banner images, pulled together dynamically from artist photos (check out http://www.loudr.fm/artist/peter-hollens/SrEXq for an example)

• Top Artist Contributors. Single out the fans who have given most to an artist across ALL their albums

• Twitter feed integration

• Customizable colors for your very own look and feel

• Social link support 

• Better SEO/Google support

  Hello YouTube fans, viewers and creators!  We invite you to join us at VidCon this coming weekend. Our team will be looking bright and colorful,  waiting to meet you at booth 431.  We really won’t be hard to miss *points to Loudr’s hot pink*.

  So, why are we going to Vidcon? We want to meet as many fans and artists as possible! We want to get to know you, hang out, chat, party, and have a blast.  This conference is our opportunity to get closer to the people we care about the most and since we want you guys to have as much fun as possible, we’ve devised a few activities for everyone.

  First off, we’ll have a mini-photo booth including a geometrical backdrop and goofy props. We’ll also be demoing a few new additions to Loudr, handing out stickers galore and providing you with answers about our platform.  Excitement in the office has really been buzzing about our contest.  Our team will have a video camera at the ready and anyone willing to get LOUDR with us will win a good-lookin’ prize! You’ll also be making an appearance on Loudr’s very first YouTube video!

  We can’t wait to make you guys scream, literally!  This past month has been spent preparing for the big road trip from San Fran to LA. We have the van rented, the banners rolled and ready, the prizes packed, the snacks purchased....the only part left? Figuring out what game to play on the road trip and packing the giant van (read : making our designer choose just 1 pair of shoes).

  Amidst all of this craze and prep for VidCon, our team would love to announce Loudr’s brand NEW Homepage (R.I.P. Big image of the guy with the fro) and Loudr’s beautiful NEW Artist Page.  Both will be launching in time for VidCon on August 1st. We really hope you fall in love with the latter - we had a lot of critique sessions with a few different artists about the design and development of their page. A lot of these critiques were propelled by InVision, allowing us to get clear feedback from an artist in Sweden! How cool!! You can look forward to more improvements to Loudr, especially after our team returns from VidCon, pumped up and ready to build faster for all of the super-amazing-talented people we’re going to meet!

The Loudr team has been quietly working behind the scenes on a project we think is pretty exciting. Today, we're thrilled to announce the arrival of a brand-new function for our users.

For a long time, we've struggled with a big issue on the mobile version of our site. Sure, the design is responsive and looks great on phones and tablets, and the large buttons make operating the site on a touch screen just as easy as using it with a mouse, but what happens AFTER you support your favorite artist and get your download link?

Until today, the answer was "nothing". You had to go to your PC, download the album you wanted, then load it onto your mobile device. With iOS locked up tight, there just wasn't an easy way to get music from Loudr onto a lot of mobile devices - and all the work-arounds we found were way too complicated. We desperately just wanted some kind of "save" button that could take care of downloads for us.

And then the folks at Dropbox invited Loudr to be one of the first platforms to support the Dropbox Saver, which they launched at DBX. 

Naturally, we accepted, and we've been working with Dropbox to make it easier than ever to get your Loudr downloads, especially on mobile platforms. Starting today, customers can now save their Loudr purchases directly to their Dropbox and get to them from anywhere. There's no need to wait around for any files to finish downloading. Saving continues even if your Internet connection drops. Here's how it works:

1) Users click the "Save to Dropbox" button.

2) They choose their destination folder and hit "OK".

3) The transfer begins and they can close the page.

That's it.

We're thrilled at how easy Dropbox has made it for us to get your music to you, wherever you are. As we continue to grow Loudr, one of our goals is to continue to work with awesome partners like Dropbox to build features and tools for our artists and fans. That way, everybody can be loud AND proud.

Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions involving album art - so many that we've tapped our in-house designer to share her thoughts on what makes awesome art. Remember that especially on a busy platform like iTunes, great art will draw customers to an album, even before they've had the chance to hear a single note. On Loudr, your art will be the very first thing that your fans see, and album art also helps entice people to pay more and receive bundled albums as well.

(Check out our previous post to learn more about Loudr and bundled albums!)

Back in February, we announced the acquisition of Kakapo, LLC on the A Cappella Records blog. Kakapo, the brainchild of Josh Whelchel, was responsible for running the Game Music Bundle and the Bundle Dragon do-it-yourself bundle platform.

Josh immediately got to work designing our direct store, Loudr, where our artists' releases can already be found on a beautiful new store. But why build yet another online music store? Sure, it has pay-what-you-want pricing and a choice of file formats, but so does Bandcamp. What truly sets Loudr apart from other music platforms? How will it help solve the HUGE problem of new music discovery? And why did we acquire a bundle-platform developer instead of a traditional online store developer?

We're thrilled to announce the arrival of our direct-to-fan platform, Loudr: http://www.loudr.fm

While we all love the iTunes store, it's become clear to us that having an additional direct option for our artists helps fill in some gaps created by iTunes. For example, iTunes doesn't exist in certain countries where our artists (and their fans!) live. Some people hate iTunes, Apple, and pretty much anything with a lower-case 'i' in front of its name. Some people are serious audiophiles and don't like compressed formats like MP3. A LOT of people don't like having to create an iTunes account to use the store.

Most importantly, iTunes takes a pretty hefty store-cut (30% off-the-top) from absolutely everyone. While it's somewhat comforting to know that major labels like Sony and Universal records are losing as much money to iTunes as we are, we'd like to give our artists an opportunity to earn more simply by selling directly to their fans.

Enter Loudr.