Ownership
Who owns it now.
Masters, publishing and catalogue transactions, traced through filings rather than announcements. Ownership is checkable, so we check it and publish the chain instead of the adjective.
as_of 2026-08-11 · updated as each installment publishes · a dash means no published figure, not zero
What this beat covers
The catalogue transaction record
Who sold, who bought, what was included, and what the artist retained. Updated on event rather than on a schedule.
Independent, or just labelled that way
Ownership chains for artists described as independent, traced to whoever actually holds the rights.
Nothing published yet.
Where these findings come from
Ownership is a public record more often than people expect
The direct answer: a great deal of music ownership is documented in public filings, and the parts that are not can often be bounded by the parts that are. A catalogue sale announced in a press release is a claim. A recorded transfer is a document.
Transfers of copyright ownership can be recorded with the US Copyright Office, and the underlying rules sit in the statute itself, published in full: chapter 1 of Title 17 defines what is owned, and chapter 2 covers transfer and the termination provisions that let an author reclaim a grant after a statutory window. Term length, which decides when any of this stops mattering, is set out in the Office's own duration FAQ, and Circular 50 covers registration of the musical work as distinct from the recording.
The termination provisions are the part most often reported wrong, and they are short enough to read directly: 17 U.S.C. §203 governs grants made by the author on or after 1 January 1978, and §304 covers the older ones, which run on a different clock. Registration and recordation records themselves are searchable in the Copyright Office's public records system, which is where a claim about a transfer either is or is not corroborated.
The distinction that decides most of these stories is that a song is two copyrights: the composition and the sound recording. They can be owned by different people, sold separately, and terminated on different clocks. When coverage says an artist sold their catalogue without saying which of the two moved, the sentence has not yet said anything. Ownership of the work as the payment systems see it is visible at the MLC, and ownership of the recording as the non-interactive systems see it sits with SoundExchange, and those two can disagree with a press release and with each other. Litigation is read from the docket via CourtListener rather than from reporting about the docket, appellate outcomes from the Court's own opinions where they reach that far, and rulemaking from the Federal Register.
The rules this desk works under
- Composition or recording, named every time. A catalogue story that does not say which copyright moved is not reportable here.
- A filing is what was filed, not what is true. Parties file self-serving documents. This desk reports what the document says and who filed it.
- Allegations are labelled as allegations, and the unheard side is named as unheard, on every piece.
Free, and actually useful
The registration checklist that keeps your royalties out of the black box
Most unmatched royalties are a registration problem, and registration is the part an artist controls without a lawyer. This is the checklist: every place a work has to be registered, every field that causes a mismatch, and the order to do it in.
No list exists yet. It opens with the first study, and the checklist goes out to everyone waiting on day one.