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IQ Artist Management, 71-75 Shelton Street, London (2026)

09/06/2026

We get asked a lot of questions about royalties and royalty payments all the time and, they always centre on the amounts received.

Metadata errors. Missed registrations. Reciprocal agreement delays. These can all lead to royalties being differential and contributes to discrepancies. But there is something beneath all of that which the Loewenthal case has now put in plain language, and it deserves to be said clearly.

The system that pays your royalties was not designed to verify them.

Johan Loewenthal is an Australian musician who spent years filing privacy law data requests with collecting societies across 12 territories. He documented 51 German TV placements across major shows including Love Island Germany, The Bachelor Germany, and others. Over 2,000 radio plays. A decade of touring German venues up to 7,000 capacity. His lifetime payment from GEMA, the German collecting society, was €8,510.

When he filed a formal Subject Access Request, APRA sent back the usage records. Forensic analysis found over 100,000 duplicate lines in the data, identical play counts appearing across three platforms in the same month. This wasn't a minor inconsistency. It was evidence that the underlying data used to calculate royalty distributions may not reflect actual usage at all.

The more significant disclosure came in APRA's written response. They stated formally: "We cannot supply further datasets including transaction-level records. In many cases, we neither hold such information nor hold the authority to obtain it."

The organisation responsible for distributing royalties is admitting, in writing, that it does not hold the data to justify the payments it makes. Royalties are distributed through reciprocal agreements using aggregated, pooled data. Individual usage cannot be independently verified. That is the admission, in writing, from the collecting society itself.

It gets even more revealing. When Loewenthal pushed SOCAN (the Canadian society) for further disclosure, internal emails came to light. On 10 November 2025, APRA wrote to SOCAN suggesting they redirect him back to APRA to prevent further disclosure. Two days later, SOCAN replied warning that a Privacy Commissioner complaint was coming, and promised to keep APRA informed of the process.

That's two international collecting societies emailing each other to manage one musician's legal data request. That is what coordination looks like when the system is under pressure.

This problem has been identified before. The EU Commission commissioned the Global Repertoire Database in 2008, a cross-territory tracking system designed to create the infrastructure this case proves was missing. £8 million was spent on it. The project collapsed in July 2014, six years in, under funding disputes, data ownership deadlock, and incompatible technical standards.

None of this should be taken to mean every PRO is acting in bad faith. The collecting society model is the infrastructure the industry runs on, and dismantling it is not the argument here. What the Loewenthal case does is remove the excuse that the opacity of the system makes individual accountability impossible to pursue.

The full case analysis, including the APRA and SOCAN emails in full, the forensic data breakdown, the collapse of the Global Repertoire Database, and a guide to filing your own SAR, is in the article.

01/06/2026

Spotify have launched their verified badge for artists. Most coverage treated it as a meaningful step toward addressing AI music flooding streaming platforms. Looking at the actual qualification requirements and the underlying mechanics, the picture is far more limited than the headlines suggested.

The badge appears in search results and confirms an account belongs to a human creator rather than a bot network. That's useful for listeners who want confidence they're streaming the real artist. For the artists themselves, the question is what it does for their earnings, and the short answer is considerably less than the launch coverage implied.

AI music's financial damage to streaming isn't primarily happening in search. It's in the algorithmic playlists and background listening environments that account for 38% of all streams. That's where AI generated tracks compete with human work for fractions of the royalty pool. Spotify's badge has no reach there. It addresses listener trust in an active search context while the income damage continues somewhere else entirely.

Spotify runs a pro rata model. Every track uploaded to the platform claims a fraction of total revenue generated in a given period. When the number of tracks increases without a ceiling, each individual track's fractional share shrinks. Deezer confirmed in April 2026 that 44% of its daily uploads are now AI generated. Separately, it flagged in January 2026 that 85% of streams from fully AI generated content are fraudulent. identified and demonetised 2 billion fraudulent streams in 2025, redirecting approximately $17 million to legitimate creators. The badge is a completely different mechanism. Identity verification and fraud prevention are not the same thing.

The qualification threshold tells you who the badge was built for. 10,000 monthly active listeners across three consecutive months, plus 1,000 followers. Spotify says this covers 99% of artists listeners actively search for. In 2025, 0.62% of Spotify's 13 million artists earned £10,000 or more. The badge threshold roughly correlates with that group, artists who already have meaningful audience scale and who, in most cases, are already protected through visibility or label relationships. The 99.38% earning less than £10,000 are not artists listeners don't search for. They're working artists, gigging artists, artists releasing music to genuine fan communities. They don't qualify for the one protection mechanism Spotify deployed this year.

CISAC projects €10 billion in cumulative losses to music creators from AI by 2028, with 24% of creator revenues at risk. MIDiA Research also reported that streaming revenue growth slowed from 10.3% in 2023 to 6.2% in 2024. When growth slows and the number of tracks claiming the pool increases, the arithmetic gets worse for human creators every quarter. Those projections land on the long tail, not the established names who already have badges and the audience scale to match.

The comparison that really matters is Deezer's payment approach. Launched in France in 2024 and extended to publishing rights in January 2025 through a partnership with Sacem, it pays double the standard rate for artists with 1,000 or more monthly listeners drawn from at least 500 unique listeners. Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group both adopted it. The model rewards genuine listening rather than just volume of streams. Spotify retains approximately 30% of platform revenue regardless of what artists earn per stream. There's no financial incentive to restructure how royalties flow. A verification badge costs considerably less to deploy than changing royalty mechanics, and it generates better coverage.

The full article covers the threshold arithmetic, the passive versus active listening distinction, and the structural comparison with Deezer's approach in more detail.

We would be interested to hear from other managers or artists, particularly those working in AI adjacent genres like electronic or ambient, where the upload volume is probably hitting harder than in most. Are you seeing it in the streaming data?

25/05/2026

Something caught our attention in January. A story appeared about DistroKid exploring a sale at around $2 billion, with Goldman Sachs and Raine advising the deal. DistroKid handles somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all new music releases globally. That's a significant portion of everything being released right now, potentially moving into new ownership.

So we did what I usually do when something catches my eye. I sat down and mapped it out properly. Who actually owns all the main distribution platforms right now? Not who owned them when you first signed up, but who sits above them today.

CD Baby was founded in 1998. If you were around in the early days of digital distribution, you'll remember what CD Baby represented. It was the original DIY option. Scrappy, affordable, built for artists releasing music themselves at a time when the majors had no interest in that market. Choosing CD Baby felt like a deliberate decision to stay outside the system. Since February 2026, CD Baby has been a Universal Music Group asset, sitting inside Virgin Music Group, acquired as part of a $775 million deal. For anyone who chose it precisely because they wanted nothing to do with the major label structure, the situation has changed.

Sony has two distribution entities. AWAL targets developing artists with label-type services and has functioned as a pathway to a full Sony signing for certain artists. The Orchard serves established independent labels and generates over $1 billion annually. Same parent company, different products.

TuneCore is owned by Believe, a publicly listed company on Euronext Paris. Believe acquired a publishing administration service called Sentric Music for €47 million in 2023 and launched a full publishing arm in October 2025. A single company now handles distribution, publishing registration, and royalty collection for artists who signed up, in many cases, just to upload their music. Most TuneCore users are entirely unaware of the structure they're sitting inside.

Warner owns ADA, its distribution and label services arm. A deal to acquire Revelator, a rights and royalty platform, was announced in April 2026 and is expected to close later this year.

There are still some genuinely independent platforms. Symphonic, Ditto Music, RouteNote, ONErpm, Amuse, and ALERA all remain independently owned as of April 2026. But Symphonic acquired Distro Nation in March 2026.

Why are the major labels buying distribution infrastructure in the first place? The revenue logic is straightforward. Distribution fees are recurring and scale automatically as more artists upload more music. But, the deeper reason is the data. Every upload sends live signals: streaming numbers, audience demographics, territory data. Owning the distribution layer means knowing which artists are gaining momentum before those artists have a manager, a lawyer, or any negotiating position. documented this dynamic as far back as 2018.

The second is that terms change quite often after acquisitions, often quietly. Most platforms notify users by email before new terms take effect. Those emails can get archived as unread. A continued use of the platform generally counts as acceptance in most jurisdictions. So an artist who hasn't read a terms of service email in two years may be operating under materially different terms without realising it.

We moved a client's catalogue from Symphonic to AWAL not long ago. AWAL flagged the tracks as already owned by someone else. We had to pull together full release documentation, original release dates, and ISRC codes before AWAL would accept the files. Then we ran two versions of every track simultaneously while the new distribution settled in, then went back to take down the originals. This was a managed move. It still took weeks. For an artist doing it alone, on principle, because they've decided they're not comfortable with who now owns their platform? Most of them will get halfway through and give up. Not because they weighed the cost and rejected it, but because the friction is enough.

The article covers the full ownership map as of April 2026, the reasoning behind why major labels are buying distribution infrastructure, and four specific questions worth running through before your next release. The questions are practical: who actually owns your distributor right now, what does the live agreement say about data sharing, is there a change of control clause, and when did you last read an email from your distributor?

08/05/2026

Since the BMG and Concord merger was announced on 28 April 2026 there have been more than a few questions on our mind.

BMG has had a specific identity in the music business for close to two decades. After it was reborn in 2008 under Bertelsmann, it positioned itself as the genuine alternative to Universal, Sony, and Warner with shorter contracts, better royalty terms, more transparency, and a stated commitment to treating artists as partners rather than a product. That pitch worked. A lot of artists signed to BMG specifically because they believed it operated differently.

Now, with the merger formally announced, the combined company projects $2.2 billion in revenue for 2026, with EBITDA of $730 million and a long-term target of $1.2 billion. The deal carries a valuation of approximately $14 billion. The incoming CEO, Bob Valentine, has described the goal as "using scale to strengthen independence." That phrase is worth examining carefully, because it is doing a significant amount of work.

What does independence actually mean at $2.2 billion in revenue?

For context: Warner Music Group posted $6.4 billion in 2024. The merged entity isn't approaching that figure, but at $2.2 billion it now enters negotiations with Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music from a position neither company held separately. That weight creates advantages for the combined catalogue, better streaming terms, more standing in AI licensing conversations that are currently reshaping the entire industry.

But the same scale creates investor expectations and commercial pressures that weren't present when BMG was positioning itself as the scrappy alternative. The company's interests in those streaming conversations, at $2.2 billion, are not identical to the interests of an individual artist on the roster.

BMG already held more than three million songs and recordings before this deal was announced. Concord's roster includes James Taylor, Soccer Mommy, The Avett Brothers, Common, Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, St Vincent, and Elvis Costello. Earlier acquisitions brought Boosey and Hawkes, the classical publisher whose catalogue includes Stravinsky, Bartók, Britten, and Prokofiev. Round Hill Music was acquired in 2023 for $468.8 million, adding 150,000 songs.

This is a seriously massive company catalogue now. And catalogue companies at this scale are central figures in the AI licensing conversations happening between music rights holders and AI developers. If your existing BMG contract has vague or outdated AI rights language, a structural change of this magnitude is precisely the moment that language starts to matter in ways it didn't before.

This pattern is worth seeing in its broader context. What's happening at the catalogue company level mirrors what's been happening at the distribution level for some years. Ownership structures across the sector are more complex than the branding typically makes visible. None of that makes these companies bad partners. But the structural context belongs in your decision-making alongside the deal terms.

If you are signed to BMG:

Locate your change of control clauses. These clauses exist in most serious music contracts and specify what happens to your agreement when ownership or management control changes hands. A merger announcement is exactly the trigger these clauses are written for.

Review your AI rights language. What does your contract say about how your music can be used in AI training datasets? What consent rights do you hold, and what notification requirements does the label carry?

Verify that your PRO and neighbouring rights registrations are fully documented and up to date independently of any internal label system. If the company's infrastructure changes during a transition period, you want your registrations to be verifiable regardless of what happens internally.

For anyone in active negotiations with BMG: these aren't hostile questions. They're standard due diligence at a moment when the company's structure is visibly changing. Any label worth signing with will have answers.

The new article walks through it all. BMG's history including the Sony BMG joint venture period that many people in the industry don't know about, what Concord brings to the deal in detail, the financial structure of the merged entity, and a practical breakdown of the specific contract clauses you need to check.

30/04/2026

When managing artists, developing income streams relies on understanding where the money in UK recorded music actually goes, and whether the headline figures translate to anything meaningful at the artist level. The BPI 's 47th annual report is compulsory reading. This year's data confirmed patterns we have been watching develop for the past 18 months. It also surfaced a story we don'tthink is getting nearly enough attention.

The BPI publishes this report every year and it is one of the most reliable primary data sources on UK recorded music. The figures come from the BPI's own data and this is not modelling or estimation. When BPI reports £1.57bn in UK recorded music revenue for 2025, that is as authoritative as it gets on UK industry figures.

UK recorded music generated £1.57bn in 2025, a 5% increase on the year before, the 11th consecutive year of growth. Total audio streams passed 210.3 billion for the first time. Vinyl revenue reached £174.7m, its highest level in over 30 years. Paid subscriptions totalled £902.2m. UK music also ranked as Britain's biggest source of cultural pride in a BPI survey, with 27% of respondents choosing music above every other cultural form.

By any reasonable measure, those are record numbers.

However, streaming revenue grew 4.6% in 2025, down from 5.7% the year before. Stream volume grew 5.5%, versus 12.8% in 2023. And paid subscriptions, the £902.2m pool that most artists depend on for their streaming income, grew just 3.1%. Two years ago, the same pool was growing at more than four times that rate.
Meanwhile, ad supported streaming, the free tier, the one with the lowest per stream rates, grew 21.8%.

We have had essentially the same conversation with artists we manage at least a dozen times over the past 18 months. Stream counts are up. Revenue is up less. One artist grew their streams 8% last year. Their streaming income grew 1.4% and that is not unusual. That is what a maturing paid subscription market, with a faster growing free tier, produces at the individual artist level. The BPI data confirms it at industry scale. The numbers just took a while to catch up to what artists were already feeling.

Vinyl amounted to £174.7m in revenue. Up 19.9% in a single year. The 18th consecutive year of growth and the highest level in over 30 years. That is a format most industry conversations in 2015 and 2016 were writing off as a niche product for collectors. It is now outperforming streaming revenue growth by a significant margin, in a format where artists can price their own work, sell direct to the people who love it, and build something tangible with an audience that chooses to spend real money.

The BPI represents the recorded music industry, labels, distributors, the infrastructure. The £1.57bn is real. Whether it flows equitably to the people who made the music is the question the report does not ask, and probably cannot answer within its scope.

The vinyl figure has the same gap. Eighteen years of growth and a 30-year revenue high, but who is capturing it? Catalogue heavy major label releases dominate the vinyl charts. Whether artists building direct fan relationships are taking their share of that £174.7m is worth looking at properly if you are making release decisions in 2026.

The industry growth story is real. Eleven consecutive years of growth is not a fluke. But the channel distributing most of that growth, paid streaming subscriptions, is showing clear signs of maturation. The faster growing part is ad supported audio, which pays less per play.

Format strategy in 2026 is a revenue question as much as a creative one. If vinyl is at a 30-year high and growing faster than streaming revenue, and you have not seriously considered a physical product as part of your release plan, that conversation is now overdue.

For artists and managers in this community, is streaming income keeping pace with streaming volume? And has vinyl entered your planning conversations in a way it had not a few years ago?

24/04/2026

UK Music 's Black Music Means Business report was published recently in March 2026. It makes for some pretty stark reading.

The headline figure is particularly striking: £24.5bn out of a total £30bn UK music market over the past 30 years. Thats roughl;y 80% of all value. UK Music describes Black music as the central force powering UK music.

UK Music classifies Black music across 138 genres divided into three tiers. The first
two cover specifically Black British genres and core Black music traditions with £6.07bn
between them. The third tier is the largest: 72 genres that originate from Black music,
accounting for £11.94bn. That Tier 3 includes a substantial portion of what most people
would call mainstream popular music. Rock, pop, drum and bass, and electronic music, genres whose cultural roots trace to Black music traditions but which are now created and consumed across every community

The 80% figure measures cultural origin over the last 30 years. It does not measure where the money actually ends up.

It is what the secondary data addresses directly, and it is not a criticism of the report.

Additionally, 80% of Black music creators and professionals have reported experiencing persistent inequity and barriers to progression. There's also a reported 20% pay gap. and, just 22% of senior industry positions are held by Black or global majority professionals. After £24.5bn of economic contribution, those figures are quite extraordinary.

The gap between what Black musical culture generates and what Black artists and
professionals receive is not a pipeline problem. It appears to be a structural one. More entry points do not fix a 20% pay gap at every career stage. The report's eight
recommendations seem to understand that distinction. They focus on institutional
funding, equitable contracting, educational integration, and government investment,
not only on increasing entry-level access.

This is the first study of this kind in Europe. The data comes from the largest volume
of commercially robust music industry information ever compiled for this purpose. The questions it raises are the right ones, and the evidence base is solid.

The report asks the right questions. Whether the industry has the appetite to act on the answers is a different matter entirely.

22/04/2026

We’ve lost count of how many conversations start with ‘I’m looking for management’ and end with a completely different diagnosis. At IQ Artist Management, we turn down roughly 80% of the artists who approach us. Not because they aren’t talented, far from it, but because they’re earning under £25,000 a year from music. At that level, giving away 20% of your income usually hurts you a lot more than it helps.

If you’re earning £18,000 annually and pay a manager 20%, you’re handing over £3,600. That leaves you £14,400 to live on, while your manager can’t realistically invest the 15–20 hours a month it takes to negotiate contracts, manage relationships, and steer your career strategically. Both of you lose. That money is often better spent on studio time, gear, or specific professional support like a music lawyer for key contracts. 📈

In 2019, a Manchester producer came to us with around £2,800 a year in music income and a strong desire for ‘proper management’. At standard commission, our cut would have been roughly £560 a year, less than the value of reading a recording contract forensically. We told him to come back when he hit £30K. He did, in 2022. We signed, and by 2024 he earned £94,000 from all music related income streams. The turning point wasn’t a lucky break; it was waiting until his income and workload justified splitting the revenue.

We’ve also seen, countless times, the damage that can be caused when artists get this timing wrong. We’ve had to help unwind management deals that cost around £40,000 over three years because the artist signed too early, on terms that didn’t match their current reality. And when you look at industry data, surveyed by (Music Managers Forum UK) the pattern is clear: in 2025, managed artists are earning around £43,938 a year on average, compared to £18,904 for unmanaged artists, but only once they reach the point where management can genuinely multiply what’s already there.

The part most people don’t talk about is in our experience, roughly 60% of ‘I need a manager’ enquiries are actually ‘I need to know I’m good enough’ conversations in disguise. That’s totally understandable as well. This industry is tough, and external validation, beyond friends and family is needed. But paying 15–20% of your income for emotional reassurance is a very expensive way to avoid the real work of building stable revenue and learning the business basics.

If you’re somewhere between £10K and £30K a year from music, the better questions to ask yourself are:
1. What exactly am I earning, from which revenue streams, over the last 12–24 months?
2. How many hours a week am I losing to admin, contract reading, and logistics instead of making music?
3. Would 15–20% commission still leave me better off in both income and time?

Good management multiplies existing success; it doesn’t create success from nothing. If your income isn’t there yet, focus on building sustainable revenue, learning to negotiate, and using targeted help (lawyers, VAs, project-based PR) instead of signing away a percentage too soon. ⚖

In this full article, we break down real case studies, specific contract clauses, and income thresholds in detail.

20/04/2026

On 9 March 2026, Live Nation reached a settlement with the US Department of Justice in the antitrust case that had threatened to separate the company from Ticketmaster.

Four sources covered the story the same day, each from a different vantage point: BBC News (trial context and financial scale), Music Business Worldwide (detailed legal background), POLITICO (the outlet that broke the story, with structural detail), and the NIVA - National Independent Venue Association , which issued a statement within hours of the announcement.

We also read Variety's confirmed settlement breakdown, Live Nation’s official statement, and additional research including AIF data submitted to UK Parliament in July 2025.

The most significant detail in this story was buried, and none of the initial reports led with it. Live Nation’s official statement makes it explicit: “There is no financial component to the settlement with the DOJ.” The widely reported $280 million is a fund created to address participating states’ damages claims, not a penalty paid to the US federal government. Politico’s initial estimate of $200M was corrected by Live Nation’s own statement.

What the DOJ did extract was structural changes. Ticketmaster must now offer both exclusive and non-exclusive ticketing proposals to major concert venues. New venue exclusivity contracts are capped at four years. Live Nation will divest 13 exclusive booking arrangements with amphitheatres across the US. And service fees at Live Nation amphitheaters are capped at 15%.

Stephen Parker, Executive Director of the National Independent Venue Association, representing nearly 2,000 independent venues, stated: “The reported settlement does not appear to include any specific and explicit protections for fans, artists, or independent venues and festivals.” He also noted that the $280M equals four days of Live Nation’s 2025 revenue. The company posted $25.2 billion in revenue last year, with operating profit rising more than 50% to $1.3 billion. This settlement was not reached from a position of weakness.

The DOJ claimed Ticketmaster controls more than 80% of primary ticketing at major concert venues. Live Nation argued the figure falls to around 40% when all venue types are counted. This dispute was not resolved by the settlement, it was sidestepped.

Varity confirmed that 27 states, including New York, California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan and Tennessee, rejected the settlement and will continue independent litigation. The settlement is not a conclusion. It is a partial pause.

In July 2025, the Association of Independent Festivals submitted data to the UK Parliament’s Business and Trade Committee showing that Live Nation controls 66.4% of UK arena, stadium and outdoor concert tickets, across an analysis of 23.1 million tickets. Directly, Live Nation controls 58.36%; including affiliates Cuffe & Taylor, DF Concerts and Metropolis, the figure reaches 66.4%. The UK’s legal monopoly threshold is 25%. Live Nation is operating at nearly three times that threshold in the UK arena and outdoor market.

AIF called for a CMA investigation in July 2025. An MPs’ inquiry into competition in the UK live sector opened in December 2025. As of today, no CMA investigation has been opened.

The US settlement provides zero relief, zero precedent and zero mechanism for UK independent artists. These two stories belong together.

We've watched the same structural pressures compound across multiple touring cycles. We have seen fee escalations grow incrementally until they represent a significant percentage of an artist’s touring economics. We have watched routing decisions constrained by venue relationships that were never formally exclusive but functioned that way in practice. We have seen developing artists make decisions about which promoters they work with based not on creative alignment but on access, because access was controlled.

What this settlement addresses is the documented, litigated version of those pressures: the formal exclusivity contracts, the amphitheater tying arrangements, the specific ticketing deals that the DOJ chose to pursue. What it does not address is the underlying architecture, the integration of venues, promotion and ticketing under one roof, that shapes the market before any individual contract is signed.

If you are an artist in this climate, document fee escalations in every touring contract. Understanding which venues have existing Ticketmaster exclusivity arrangements, the 4-year cap applies to new deals only. Watch the state litigation, particularly New York and California, where the case continues without federal involvement.

For UK-based artists: the AIF’s call for a CMA investigation and the ongoing parliamentary inquiry are the mechanisms that matter in this market. Engage with both. The US settlement is not your settlement.

The structure that created this problem remains standing. What changes is how parts of it are administered.

IQ Artist Management

09/06/2026

01/06/2026

25/05/2026

08/05/2026

30/04/2026

24/04/2026

22/04/2026

20/04/2026

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