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Money owed that noone knowed. Are you a member of SoundExchange? Actually, let me rephrase, do you have songs on myspace? If you do then head over to SoundExchange and grab yourself a free membership. SoundExchange is a non-profit performance rights organization that collects statutory royalties from satellite radio (such as SIRIUS XM), internet radio and other streaming platforms. Myspace recently teamed up with SoundExchange to help identify the more than 25,000 major, indie and unsigned artists who are registered with myspace but not with SoundExchange. Collectively there's $14 mill in royalties sitting in a SoundExchange bank account, waiting to be paid to you.

1. The best approach is slow and cautious. Right now, we are in the jungle. In the jungle, you don't rush blindly ahead. You dip a toe in the sand, and see if you sink. We have no hope of predicting which of these services might catch on. We need to move slowly, with very short-term agreements and see what works and what fails. And we need to be sure not to undermine our other business partners while we do that. Which leads to… 2. We should support our allies and punish our enemies. Rob McDaniels for InGrooves estimates that it takes 150-200 streams of one song to equal the royalty income on a single download. Right now, our industry still relies on the sale of physical product (believe it or not, it's still the primary source of revenue) and on digital downloads. Perhaps streaming is the future. Perhaps not. But we would be very unwise to cut ridiculously low-cost rates to a business model that obviously threatens both physical retailers and iTunes. Let's take care of the people paying our bills. At the same time, we should continue to press ahead with legal efforts against things like Pirate Bay- efforts that are finally starting to show some results. 3. We need to recognize that "bundling" and ad-revenue sharing is a marriage, and it works both ways. If we bundle the cost of music access into the cost of a mobile phone or the sale of a computer, we're now not only in the music business, we're in the electronics business. Any economic factors that hurt the sales of phones and computers will now hurt us as well. 4. Most of all, we need transparency in the negotiations and setting of rates, so that everyone in the music community understands what they're being paid and how it's being calculated.

Grooveshark is a music streaming service that is accessed through your browser, and is driven by users who upload their record collections. Currently Universal has initiated legal action against the service for failing to pay royalties, which is bad news for the shark. The good news comes to indie musicians looking to capitalize on increased exposure. Since it is a free service to access indie bands can upload their music to the service in hopes of extending their fan base. Users who wish to purchase your music can also be referred to Amazon or Itunes. In 2010 have your music in more places.

Labels - 0, Songwriters - 1 In a historic deal between labels and songwriters the national music publishers association has come away with a major win in an agreement that will see labels forking out the monies from "pending and unmatched accounts" that are set up in cases where a publisher has not been located by a record label, or an ownership dispute over a song. This is good news for the industry because publishers and labels are finally beginning to see eye to eye.

Tick Tock, The Copyright Act of 1976 is About to Expire. It's always entertaining to me to watch the money traps that the labels set for artists, back before information was freely available, EXPLODE! Welp, that's exactly what's about to go down. The Copyright Act states that an artist or author who sold a copyright before 1978 can take it back 56 years later and If it was sold during or after 1978 they can take it back 35 years later. Assuming a correct and prompt filing of paper work, the record labels could lose sound recording copyrights they bought in 1978 starting in 2013. How does this affect you? If the labels don't wanna lose the contents of their entire library you can make a for sure bet that the new copyright law will be negotiated in your favor. Higher royalties anyone?