Digital Music News is reporting that The Orchard (owned by Sony) has cut a direct deal for digital performer royalties with Sirius/XM.
So now all those poor artists unfortunate enough to have a distribution deal with The Orchard/Sony (which somehow mysteriously includes me and one of my albums!!!?) , will now how have their SoundExchange royalties paid to Sony instead of directly from SoundExchange.
So right about now you are saying “WTF?!!”
Yeah, The Orchard didn’t mention that tiny little detail in their letter did they? They presented it to you like it was an great improvement.
But this is the entire point of the deal: THEY GET THEIR HANDS ON YOUR MONEY.
But, hey I’m sure you can totally trust Sony/The Orchard to pay you your royalties without taking any deductions right? They’d never do that. They are the most organized distributor ever.
Well….
Let me give you two examples with which I have first hand experience.
1) The Orchard/Sony can’t even be fucking bothered to return two years of emails or a phone calls from me. They are claiming rights to an album of mine for which I do not believe they have rights. And if they are claiming rights to this album shouldn’t I be getting royalties or at the very least statements?
If my shit is disappearing into a black hole, do you really want to trust them with your non-recoupable SoundExchange royalties?
2) We have been granted access to email conversations and documents between independent labels and The Orchard/Sony. These labels reported dramatic drops in revenues when they switched to The Orchard/Sony. There was never any real explanation from the Orchard and the independent labels eventually left on very bad terms with The Orchard.
Is this a trial balloon for mainstream Sony Artists? Will all sony artists soon lose their SoundExchange royalties?
Stay tuned.
The Trichordist 
This is RIchard Gottehrer (founder of The Orchard) in a nutshell. Back in the glory (?) days of The Orchard, I found out they were placing UPC stickers of THEIR barcode over my UPC codes on the CDs, then shipping them out to retail. Guess who got the Soundscan numbers? They also did this for “promotional only; not for sale” CDs and SOLD them, taking all the money, because artists and labels assumed these were, um, promos and, um, not for sale. I demanded all my stock back and they didn’t even have enough shame to remove their barcode stickers when I retrieved the stock. It’s classic; Model yourself as the “new independent distribution model”, sign up your marks – er, new artists – in a cattle drive, and fuck the 99% who don’t know any better, then bundle your “market share” into a package and sell it to SONY. Gotterher’s always been slime, always will be.
Hmmm. I thought The Orchard just blew off my emails because my label is tiny.