Does America need another performing rights organization? Hayden Bower thinks so.
Bower, who leads AllTrack, the industry’s newest PRO as of 2017, says he was inspired by the rise of independent musicians making and releasing music from their bedrooms. “If you look at the marketplace in the early 2000s, ASCAP and BMI [the two leading PROs in the United States] combined had about 350,000 or so members. Today, they have 2.5 million members. Meanwhile, the U.S. population only grew 18% in that time,” Bower says. “Technology opened the floodgates.”
Bower defines this surge as the formation of a “significant middle class of professional or aspiring professional songwriters,” and he says he saw an opportunity to serve those creators’ specific needs with a PRO that manages not only performance rights but also mechanical and neighboring rights. And by founding a new organization, he says he has avoided taking on the baggage of nearly a century of old catalog and metadata that plagues the incumbents. “The [others] were basically competing for the same narrow sliver of top-tier talent,” Bower says, pointing to the opaque ways that PROs court that talent by, for instance, offering what are called bonuses.
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Bower pledges to keep AllTrack simple. Royalty calculations are transparent, and radio bonuses are not paid to big-name artists. The PRO’s searchable repertory of songs and writers is open to anyone’s use. AllTrack can assist with multiple types of royalty collections for an additional administration fee, including liaising with the Mechanical Licensing Collective and neighboring rights sources. Bower says operations for royalty collection and distribution are streamlined using proprietary technology. “Some of our writers are now collecting more money than they were previously,” he claims.
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Early adopters of AllTrack include writers/producers of songs performed by No Doubt, Future, Sublime, Elle King, Ty Dolla $ign, NOFX, Whethan and Gucci Mane. The organization has also made significant headway in gaining the approval of the industry establishment. In 2024, AllTrack joined the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) — the global standard-bearer for collection societies — as a rights management entity. AllTrack’s website also cites partnerships and affiliations with the National Music Publishers’ Association, the Association of Independent Music Publishers and the Music Managers Forum.
With more PROs operating in the United States than any other country — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, Global Music Rights, PRO Music Rights and now AllTrack (SESAC and GMR operate on an invitation-only basis) — the government has taken notice. In February, the U.S. Copyright Office opened a notice of inquiry into “emerging issues” with PROs here at the behest of Congress, which expressed concerns about the “proliferation” of new PROs, as well as the sector’s alleged lack of transparency.
Bower says AllTrack’s existence is justified because it serves creators who are underserved by its predecessors. “We’re proud of the fact that not only did we successfully start a PRO, but we then bolted on mechanical and neighboring rights,” he says. “There’s nothing else like it.”
What was the greatest hurdle you faced in the creation of AllTrack, and how did you overcome it?
There’s a few. There’s a technology hurdle: how to have people come to your site, register songs, track all the metadata and distribute it throughout the world. That was extremely complicated. There’s also the business hurdle of “How do you get writers to sign up if you don’t have licenses?” and “How do you get licenses if you don’t have writers?” It’s a chickenor-egg problem that needed to be solved. We went several years before we were able to even enter into a single license with a licensee [any public platform that uses music services like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube, as well as bars, restaurants and other venues]. And in the meantime, we were compensating our songwriters because why would someone join AllTrack if we weren’t? We needed to show we were a reputable business partner.
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How were you funded back then?
We took funding from artist managers, business managers, agents and other rights organizations. It started with me asking people’s opinions of whether there should be a PRO for independent creators, and everyone gave a resounding yes — 100%. Then we did a venture round for strategic music investors.
In most countries, there’s only one PRO or collection society. Why did you feel there needed to be another player in the United States?
We thought there could be a better solution in terms of managing multiple terms [performance, mechanical and neighboring rights] so that this middle class of songwriters would be able to earn to their full potential. For talent today, you can’t just put out an album once a year — you’ve got to feed the content machine all the time. To have to layer rights management on top of that is really complicated. What we’ve done is create a single-use portal that, to us, feels like a large leap forward and fills the gap of what the industry has been missing. Also, there’s a lot of chatter out there about how large, incumbent PROs have distribution methodologies where — how do I put this? — some songwriters are compensated more than others.
You mean bonuses, right?
Yes, there’s a bonus system. There might be collections in the general licensing market [money collected from bars, restaurants and other venues where music is played], and no one knows exactly which song was played when. So the question becomes “If you collect this money, how do you distribute it?” The existing PROs tend to take that money and pay it out in the form of radio bonuses. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s within their rights. Our target audience of independent artists is probably not part of that radio bonus pool. They’re predominantly streaming artists. So we said, “Why don’t we just take those collections and distribute them across digital performances?” We feel it’s more of a democratized way of paying out royalties.
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The Copyright Office inquiry into U.S. PROs is still ongoing. What’s your take?
AllTrack is a byproduct of the proliferation of creators that exist. There are now eight times more songwriters than existed 20 years ago. We’re talking millions more songwriters. People need to not look at this as “Oh, another PRO popped up for the sake of it.” If we hadn’t seen this tidal wave of new creators, AllTrack would not exist.
What’s your response to venues, bars and restaurants that complain about rising licensing costs?
We are the smallest PRO and that’s reflected in our rates to licensees. We’re the smallest licensing fee out there, and for many organizations it’s just a hundred [dollars] or so a year — not tens of thousands. Yes, because AllTrack arrived, you might have a small increase in cost if you’re a bar, but it’s just a drop in the bucket relative to the inflation in other areas of life.
Do you feel this inquiry should be happening at all?
Music is a fairly highly regulated industry. The U.S. economy was built on the idea of free markets — buyers and sellers working out issues independently without interference. AllTrack is a testament to free markets and how, with that freedom, music can solve its own problems. If the independent artist community was feeling frustrated Revise to: with PROS, AllTrack is an option that fits their needs.
What was your response to the Copyright Office?
One thing we noted in our letter to the Copyright Office is that in CISAC’s 2024 report, they ranked countries around the world based on royalty collections as a percentage of [gross domestic product], and guess what the U.S. ranked? Forty-fifth. For so many years, the U.S. has been a leader in entertainment, and to see a statistic like that is shocking. As leaders in entertainment, we should be figuring out how to compensate songwriters more, not less. This stat is a testament to how regulations and government interference have placed a limit on the value of music copyrights in this country. We don’t need to discuss any changes to the system that could potentially depress that value even more.
In the middle of this inquiry, President Donald Trump fired Shira Perlmutter, the Register of Copyrights. Do you think the new regime change will affect the outcome?
It certainly could impact the outcome, but I don’t have a pulse on it. Only time will tell.
