MBW Views is a series of op-eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. The following MBW op/ed comes from Scott Cohen — co-founder of The Orchard, former Chief Innovation Officer at Warner Music Group, and former CEO of music-royalties platform Jukebox (formerly JKBX).
Below, Cohen argues that the artists whose catalogs, data and rights power the industry’s biggest deals don’t share in the money those deals generate — and that it’s time to fix that…
What’s keeping me up at night isn’t a new threat; it’s an old one, finally coming into focus.
Music’s most persistent injustice
I’ve spent more than 35 years inside the music industry trying to solve problems, but one problem continues to persist. The value created by a song is reduced to a singular royalty payment while the real value is captured by the multibillion-dollar organizations built on the backs of those songs.
I know this because I’ve been guilty of, and seen, the injustice of this recurring pattern first hand.
In 1997, I co-founded The Orchard with Richard Gottehrer, widely recognized as the world’s first digital music distributor. Established at the dawn of the digital music era, The Orchard transformed the way independent artists and labels reached audiences worldwide and became one of the industry’s most successful distribution businesses.
The company was acquired by Sony Music in 2015 and remains a global leader in music distribution with annual revenue exceeding $2B.
I was there alongside Richard when The Orchard was sold. The artists and labels whose catalogs built the Company’s value — the ones whose music made our business worth acquiring in the first place — received exactly zero dollars from that sale. Not because anyone did anything wrong. It’s just the way it was – business as usual.
More than 10 years later nothing has changed.
In the first half of 2026 alone, major record labels and publishers have acquired distribution platforms, royalty administration businesses, technology providers, and music catalogs in transactions collectively valued at over $12 billion.
These are major, industry changing deals including Virgin Music’s acquisition of Downtown; the Primary Wave / Kobalt deal; the merger of BMG and Concord; WMG’s acquisition of Revelator; and the sale of Recognition’s (formerly Hipgnosis) music rights portfolio to Sony Music Publishing.
The financial value of these transactions is staggering; yet the artists and composers whose music these businesses were built upon, will receive nothing from these payouts. They were paid royalties along the way – that was the justification. But that feels deeply unfair to me.
Time to be cut into the action?
I am not making accusations against anyone. I am simply spotlighting the part of the value gap that doesn’t make headlines, because there is no obvious villain.
These aren’t evil tech platforms exploiting creators through fine print. These are music companies run by people who love the industry, who built genuinely useful infrastructure, and who are, in most cases, motivated to serve artists because they are passionate about music.
But how can we bridge that value gap?
I love the Web 3 ethos: those that contribute to a network should be rewarded by the network.
So here’s what I firmly believe should change: when a company’s value is built substantially on the rights, the catalogs, and even the data from creators, there should be some mechanism that allows them to financially participate in that value creation.
Artists, composers, and rightsholders are not merely supplying music, but are also creating the underlying value that drives the entire music industry. The value of music should not be solely distilled down to the royalties paid for copyrights. The value should extend to the commercial value that it creates for organizations.
Nobody owes anyone an apology for deals that were done in the past, but if we can make things better in the future we should. What I am interested in is what we build next, so that we can change things for the better and continue to improve the music economy so that all participants benefit from what they put into it.
If we are going to keep building companies on backs of artists — and we are, because that’s the business we are in — then those artists need to be structurally included in the upside, not just the royalty stream.
Let’s start by expanding the definition of artists. They are not just creating art, they are creating value; and it is time to ensure that they are entitled to capture that value.
The best part of this approach? Everyone wins.Music Business Worldwide
