Guest
Hans Peter Roth
Hans Peter Roth is Co-owner at Muserk, as introduced on the show.
Episodes (1)
Hans Peter Roth, co-owner of Muserk, explains how the rights administrator recovers unclaimed publishing royalties and scaled to more than 20 million works.
Questions these episodes answer
How did Muserk find half a million dollars in unclaimed YouTube royalties?
In 2017, Muserk onboarded about 30,000 works from small non-Anglo royalty societies whose songwriters had never been paid from the US market. Within two months, YouTube paid roughly half a million dollars into Muserk's account for uses of those songs nobody had claimed before, which convinced Roth the unclaimed-royalty problem was far bigger than the side project Muserk had started as.
What is the Mechanical Licensing Collective and how did Muserk respond to it?
The MLC is a US government-mandated agency rather than a society. It collects money only from subscription audio streaming and downloads and pays it to registered rights holders. Muserk considered bidding to become one of its vendors but chose to stay independent instead, and its own catalog grew from 4 million works when the MLC launched in January '21 to more than 20 million today.
Why does Hans Peter Roth reject the idea that music royalties are one pie split between labels and publishers?
Roth says treating royalties as a single pie divided between labels and publishers puts the two sides in an unnecessary tug of war, when each side's rights actually carry their own separate value that should be priced on its own terms. He compares it to a sausage maker paying separate prices for ham and beef instead of negotiating one shared price for both.
Why does Hans Peter Roth see Africa and Asia-Pacific as Muserk's next growth market?
Roth says Africa and APAC hold about 75 percent of the world's population but account for only around 15 percent of online music value, while Europe, the US and Latam take the rest with a much smaller share of people. He traces the gap to songwriter and publishing data lagging behind sound-recording data in markets historically built on live performance.
What risk does AI-generated music create for royalty administrators like Muserk?
Roth says the biggest problem is money getting paid out on AI-generated content that should never have been copyrightable in the first place, which then has to be clawed back through credit notes, an overhead cost no other industry deals with. He chairs a European steering committee working on shared rules and data standards, including DDEX, so licensors handle these cases consistently.