Metallica Is Betting on This Founder to Fight for Their Songwriter Royalties. Can He Win?

Mention Jeff Price‘s name in a room full of music executives and some will almost certainly wince and say that he is a troublemaker — an entrepreneur who enjoys noisily lashing out at those in the business he perceives are not doing right by music artists, songwriters, comedians and other creators.

Most conspicuously, that sense of righteousness has manifested in a two-year on-and-off email battle — often with journalists, including this reporter cc’d — with the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), the nonprofit organization established by the Music Modernization Act (MMA) to administer blanket licenses for digital streams and downloads in the United States.

Price claims that deficiencies in the MLC’s operations have deprived clients of his current startup, Word Collections, royalty payments, and, in other cases, have delayed payments.

What Price’s critics rarely acknowledge is that Word Collections is the third successful business that he has built as a result of his indignation. “It’s usually a combination of something that I’m frustrated with, combined with having an opportunity in my professional career to correct it,” he says of his entrepreneurial ventures.

For example: Price founded TuneCore in 2006 to help DIY artists and indie labels get their music onto digital platforms for a fraction of what it previously cost. Then, in 2013, he started Audiam, which claims YouTube publishing royalties for DIY songwriters who, in many cases, are uninformed about music publishing and how to get paid for their work. And he established his latest venture, Word Collections, in 2020 to fight for and collect mechanical royalties for comedians’ recordings, which many digital services were not paying at the time.

Although Price admits he departed the first two companies under unpleasant circumstances — possibly due to his combative nature — TuneCore and Audiam were successfully sold. Word Collections is still in a growth phase, but many of Audiam’s investors are helping to fund it — proof that he remains a bankable entrepreneur.

And these investors are not small players. Key among them is Black Squirrel Partners, the investment division of Metallica’s business operations. The band and Black Squirrel were a client and investor, respectively, in Audiam and followed Price to Word Collections, which now also represents music artists. (Pop artist Jason Mraz is among other investors who did the same.)

The reason: Black Squirrel principal and partner Eric Wasserman says that while at Audiam, Metallica’s income “went from a small amount to a significant portion of the revenue from their [intellectual property].”

The band apparently is happy at Word Collections as well. In July 2023, Price and Word Collections closed on a $5 million investment round led by Black Squirrel, which became its lead investor. “We are very enthusiastic about this company and Jeff’s leadership,” Wasserman says. “Word Collections is doing a great job representing the Metallica catalog.”

Other Word Collections clients include Greta Van Fleet, The Offspring, Grace Potter, Thomas Dolby, Galactic, John Oates, Switchfoot, Richard Marx and the estate of Johnny Marks, among other songwriters. Word Collections, which employs a staff of 10, also represents the comedy catalogs of Robin Williams, George Carlin, Margaret Cho, Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Crystal, among others.

Because of his history of saber-rattling, Price acknowledges that industry executives have accused him of being an opportunist looking for industry problems so that he could profit from those issues.

“Yes, it [can be] a business opportunity, but that’s usually not the driving force,” he says. “It isn’t like, ‘Ha ha, here’s this thing, let me go make money off it.’ It’s more of, ‘This thing is not right, let’s fix it,’ which also happens to be a business opportunity.”

‘That’s stealing in my mind’

Slim with gray hair parted in the middle, Price does not resemble a street fighter. He even sports a broad smile in his LinkedIn photo. Of all the stands he has taken against the industry, he is best known for publicly opposing — and loudly criticizing — the MMA, which passed in 2018 and dramatically changed digital music licensing and how payments are made for compositions. He was even part of a group, which dubbed itself the American Music Licensing Collective (AMLC), that vied against the National Music Publishers’ Association’s (NMPA) preferred assemblage of major music publishers to be designated the MMA’s administrator of digital licenses.

The U.S. Copyright Office went with the NMPA-backed team — now known as the MLC — but not before Price had alienated several of the industry’s legacy players.

While the passage of the MMA was largely hailed as a beneficial game-changer for songwriters, Price alleges that the law created a form of legal theft that benefits large publishers. That’s because songs for which the publisher or payout instructions cannot be determined are designated as black-box monies — they are also called unmatched or unclaimed royalties — and if the rightful recipient cannot be determined within three years, the MLC has the authority to distribute these monies to publishers based on their market share.

Unmatched royalties total hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and Price contends that the bulk of them are generated by DIY creators who don’t know how to properly register their songs with the MLC. Worse, he says, if those creators learn belatedly that their royalties were distributed elsewhere, they cannot retroactively claim them, because according to the text of the MMA, distributions of unclaimed and/or unmatched royalties “shall supersede and preempt any state law (including common law) concerning escheatment or abandoned property, or any analogous provision, that might otherwise apply.”

“I believe [digital services] should get a license and pay a commensurate royalty, and the entity that earns the royalty should get the money,” Price says. “The other side is like, ‘We don’t want to do that. Why don’t we just take all this money that’s not getting paid and hand it to ourselves based on a black-box [market-share] allocation?’ And that’s stealing, in my mind.”

However, the MLC has yet to use this market-share mechanism to disburse any black-box monies, which have been accumulating for the last eight years and predate the passage of the MMA.

Price has other issues with the MLC, and in addition to the blizzard of emails he has sent its CEO, Kris Ahrend, and other executives there, his complaints are collected in a 53-page memo submitted by Word Collections that opposes redesignating the organization as the administrator of blanket compulsory mechanical licenses “without significant policy and governance changes to achieve the [MMA’s] intended goals and objectives.”

Word Collections’ memo is one of 63 posted on the U.S. Copyright Office website as it conducts a mandated periodic review on whether the MLC should be redesignated. While other submissions suggest improvements, the overwhelming majority support the MLC’s reappointment, if the more than 500 publishing companies and industry trade organizations cited in the MLC’s own filing are counted. Among those in favor are Warner Chappell Music, peermusic, the RIAA, the Recording Academy, the Academy of Country Music, the Association of Independent Music Publishers and the NMPA.

The MLC declined to comment, but industry executives say in its defense that the organization is dealing with a vast amount of data and, as a result, its execution “will never be flawless or perfect,” as one music publishing source puts it.

In the early days of streaming, Price’s squeaky-wheel approach earned him grudging respect as a renegade. But over the years, his detractors have grown in number, and some say they are weary of his unyielding combativeness, even if he is right.

‘The messenger being the problem’

One executive says Price “is a classic example of the messenger being the problem, not the message,” explaining, “While he is really trying to get the most money for songwriters, the way he has gone about highlighting these issues pisses off everybody.”

An executive in the digital music realm calls Price “litigious.” In reality, Price has not directly sued any digital services, but through data supplied by his company, he was involved in songwriter lawsuits filed against Spotify, including a 2017 legal action led by Camper Van Beethoven founder and musicians’ rights activist David Lowery that resulted in a $45 million settlement, and others by Four Seasons member and songwriter Bob Gaudio, Bluewater Music, and Dolby.

Word Collections’ data was also used in lawsuits filed by a number of comics against Pandora, including Andrew Dice Clay, Bill Engvall, Ron White and the estates of Carlin and Williams. Price says his clients usually don’t resort to litigation until a digital service has spent about a year ignoring requests for payment.

Others in the industry offer a more charitable assessment of Price. One executive who has crossed swords with him says he’s “difficult to work with” but concedes that “98% of what he says is correct.” The executive adds, “[Price] is not a lawyer, so sometimes he gets a nuance wrong, but in terms of the important stuff — like how digital services didn’t pay publishing properly and what’s wrong with the system in publishing — he was the only one making noise.”

“I think Jeff is a catalyst and is brilliant,” says Jordan Bromley, entertainment group leader for law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips. “Guys like him don’t follow rules or lines of politics. They say the quiet things out loud.”

Though Price concedes that he “once” apologized to the MLC for mistakenly claiming it hadn’t paid out Pandora royalties due to Word Collections, he expresses no regret for his unflagging approach to perceived transgressors. “Water on stone eventually makes the Grand Canyon,” he says. “I am working from outside the system to change the system.”

Before entering the music industry, Price lived an itinerant life. His mother founded an advertising agency in the 1970s when it was still a male-dominated business, and they moved frequently for her career. Growing up, he says he attended eight schools in a 12-year period. He also spent time in Japan and Israel, where he served in the latter’s military reserve. He worked as a bartender, sold books out of mall kiosks and was a production assistant for film/TV producer Rachael Horovitz, the older sister of the Beastie Boys’ Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz.

Price, who attributes his rectitude to once witnessing his father stop an attack against another person, entered the music industry in 1991 as a co-founder of the SpinART indie label, which released the music of such indie acts as Frank Black, The Church, Apples in Stereo, The Boo Radleys and Vic Chesnutt before succumbing to bankruptcy in 2007. “SpinART taught me everything I know about the industry,” Price says. “I wouldn’t be able to make informed decisions without the knowledge that experience gave me.”

As iTunes, Rhapsody and other online music stores started up, Price began looking for a digital distributor for SpinART, but says he was angered by the terms he was offered, especially what he considered unwarranted high distribution fees. “Distributors were demanding 15% to 30% of revenue to basically send a digital file to places like Apple and Amazon,” he says. “Overlaying the analog business funnel on top of the digital channel just didn’t make sense.”

Price voiced his grievances in a 2006 issue of Billboard. “I despise the economic model of aggregators. They are morally repugnant,” he said. “On the physical side, distributors work their asses off. They provide co-op opportunities; they’ll have regional sales reps. In the digital world, they don’t provide that service. They’re an aggregator.”

Through his dissatisfaction, Price saw an opportunity to fill a void in the market, and with partners Gary Burke and Peter Wells launched TuneCore in 2006. To date, it’s his most successful venture and remains a major indie player 13 years after he and his partners left the company.

TuneCore’s model was simple and elegant. It initially charged a flat rate of $7.98 an album per year and a delivery charge of 99 cents per song to put titles up on all the digital stores, with all sales revenue going to the artist. By 2010, prices had increased to $49.99 an album per year and $9.99 per song.

Price’s refusal to play by established rules earned him scorn when he created his own International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) — essentially digital fingerprints for tracking royalties — for works released by TuneCore artists instead of paying the RIAA, which, at the time, assigned the codes.

‘Took off like a rocket‘

TuneCore “took off like a rocket and it was a heck of a learning curve,” Price recalls. “All of a sudden, we were doing over a million dollars a month. We were like, ‘Holy crap!’ And then that number became $8 million to $10 million a month. It got crazy how quickly it grew.”

The company eventually needed funding to accommodate that growth and brought in Guitar Center and Opus Capital as investors. But the introduction of private equity blew up management in 2012. Price and some of his staff were ousted, and in 2015, the company was acquired by Believe Music, where it is now one of the largest independent distributors in the world.

While at TuneCore, Price realized that indie artists were not collecting their fair share of music publishing royalties and started a publishing administration division. After his departure, he founded Audiam in June 2013 as, he says, a corrective.

His team built a system that tracked down cover versions of songs and user-generated videos on YouTube and other streaming platforms that included unlicensed recordings of songs. On behalf of its clients, Audiam claimed the songs to collect both publishing and recorded master royalties that were due.

A publisher administrator client of Audiam says, “We may have found 30 cover versions of a song, but when Jeff entered the picture, he said, ‘Here are 225 ISRC cover versions of that song.’ ”

Like TuneCore, anyone could sign up for Audiam, but this time Price’s economic model took an undisclosed percentage of the revenue.

Official videos of a song were easy to find and claim, but songs included in user-generated videos and cover versions performed by DIY artists were not, and Audiam’s success enabled the company to expand into licensing and collecting publishing royalties from other digital platforms such as Spotify and Amazon. But that meant Price was soon butting heads with those platforms’ service agents, like the Harry Fox Agency and Music Reports Inc.

Audiam eventually attracted major artists such as Metallica, Mraz and Jimmy Buffett. Industry heavyweights also invested, including Q Prime co-founder Cliff Burnstein, then-WME head of music Mark Geiger, Victory Records founder Tony Brummel, Distrokid founder Philip Kaplan, Silva Entertainment namesake Bill Silva and Provident Financial Management.

When Audiam’s growth required new sources of funding, Price and his investors agreed to sell the company to the Canadian performing rights organization SOCAN in 2016. But his relationship with the PRO soured, in part because of his vociferous opposition to the MMA and the NMPA’s backing of the legislation that calls for market-share distribution of black-box monies.

When Price and the AMLC team he helped assemble began jockeying with the NMPA’s choice to administer blanket mechanical licenses for the MMA, informed sources say his efforts — which included posting videos to YouTube that questioned the fairness and transparency of music publishing — resulted in SOCAN management taking fire from the mainstream music industry.

SOCAN pressured Price to abandon his protest, sources say, and his relationship with the PRO became further complicated when Audiam’s investors began agitating for an additional equity payout because, they claimed, the company had hit previously agreed-upon profit performance targets.

Price says he resigned due to the equity payout issue, which created a conflict because he was serving as his initial investors’ security representative while also still leading the company. He says he agreed to stay on long enough to help prepare Audiam for a sale, but was terminated before that happened.

Price declines to elaborate but says his parting with Audiam, like his departure from TuneCore, was “unpleasant,” and in 2021, SOCAN sold the company — ironically, to the MLC’s data management agent, the Harry Fox Agency, which is now owned by the Blackstone-owned SESAC Music Group. As for Audiam’s investors, sources say that a lawsuit filed on their behalf resulted in an undisclosed settlement in addition to the initial payout from the sale. (SOCAN declined to comment, as did Eric Baptiste, who led the PRO when it purchased Audiam.)

By then, Price had started Word Collections, which originally focused on comedy streams. He likened comedians’ jokes to song compositions that were deserving of publishing royalties. Up to then, most digital services had been paying record labels for comedic master recordings but not the underlying literary compositions. “That’s what Jeff does,” says ClearBox Rights founder and principal John Barker. “He recognizes when people aren’t getting paid, and he finds a solution.”

After the expiration of Price’s noncompete clause with Audiam, Word Collections expanded into music publishing administration, putting him in competition with his former company. And though TuneCore remains Price’s most successful startup, he claims Word Collections’ revenue now matches the publishing royalty volume collected by Audiam.

Price retains strong opinions on the MMA and gives no indication that he’s ready to ease up on the MLC, certainly as long as publisher market share could be used to disburse black-box monies. But he claims he has dialed back his combativeness on a number of industry issues because much of what he complained about has been corrected.

And in a number of ways, Price is no longer the outsider he claims to be. “It’s an interesting paradox for me,” he says. “We are directly licensed outside North America with the largest digital services in the world, which enables Word Collections to collect mechanical and performance royalties from streams. Wherever we can, we disintermediate the CMOs, the subpublishers and the black boxes in between songwriters and their money. For nondigital, we collect from 104 countries and are direct members in 40 of the music rights organizations in their countries through a joint venture with Nashville publishing administrator Bluewater Music,” he adds. “We work for some of the most important artists in the world and some of the biggest artist management companies and music companies in the world. I like being on the same side of the fence as them.”