Ben Koller (Converge, Mutoid Man, etc.) and royalty expert/educator/musician Dan Hegarty (Conflict One Zero) have banded together to form the Heavy Music Collective. The collective have racked up some impressive clients, including thrash metal titans Metallica.
The Heavy Music Collective is a division of Word Collections, a global publishing administrator that secured Metallica as a lead investor back in 2023 via the band’s Black Squirrel Partners. So far, the Heavy Music Collective lists Metallica, Baroness, Converge, The Offspring, Greta Van Fleet and Yngwie Malmsteen among its clientele.
In the below video, Koller broke down what the collective have set out to do for fellow heavy music artists [transcribed by theprp.com]:
“If you have music on the streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify, you probably want to hear about this. In 2018 the Music Modernization Act was passed. This law created an agency called the MLC, the Mechanical Licensing Collective. When you put your song on Spotify, it has two royalty halves. One is the sound recording, one is the musical composition.
The musical composition generates a mechanical royalty. Spotify and Apple Music, and everybody else has to pay that money to the mechanical licensing collective. Once it’s there, it’s your job to go and find it and fill out all the paperwork and claim the money that’s rightfully yours.
But guess what? If you don’t claim that money in three years, they are legally allowed to take it all back and give it to the major music publishers. So, with the Heavy Music Collective, it’s our job to find all that money that’s rightfully yours and get it before they do.
But hey guess what? That’s only in the United States. If your music streams in England, France, Australia, Japan — you get mechanical royalties there too. But guess what? All those countries have different organizations you have to get your money from, and if you don’t get it, it goes to the major music publishers. Noticing a trend here?”
You can find out more info on the collective and apply for their services over at heavymusiccollective.com.
