Spoken Giant Launches As First Royalty Administration For Podcasters And Comedians

Creators have been in large part, left out of the collection portion of their profits, entrusting rights organizations to advocate on their behalf. In Q4 of 2019, BMI collected and distributed over $1 billion in royalties to songwriters and publishers with broadcast media revenue accounting for more than half the company’s revenue. ASCAP, The American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers, which runs on a slightly different fiscal calendar than BMI, reported record revenues of over $1.2 billion, with $1.184 billion paid out collectively to ASCAP members.

With a rise in the “spoken word” space encompassing podcasting, comedy, and oration, a sinkhole of uncollected royalties was discovered by record label execs, Ryan Bitzer, Damion Greiman, and former BMI executive, Jim King, who came together to form the first collective advocate administration for spoken word royalties – Spoken Giant. Damion and Ryan who are the co-founders of 800 Pound Gorilla Records, a comedy label representing Robin Williams, The Richard Pryor estate and other top comedians, started to see discrepancies in mechanical royalties for their artists and that’s when they connected with King who formerly ran operations around data management tools used to pay songwriters, lyricsists, composers, and publishers at BMI.

Using the number of performances of jokes on terrestrial radio, in downloads and through other data points, Spoken Giant has modeled unpaid royalties in the tens of millions of dollars a year in comedy alone with a similar estimate in podcasting collections. The podcasting space is a bit nascent and hard to estimate because it depends on the licensing model podcast owners are willing to adopt – many of which who see the medium as a content or advertising play – not so much a way to capture ownership of their intellectual property.

The music industry, which much of the streaming space is modeled after, has historically devalued artists so it makes sense why many podcasters may not be attempting to negotiate for their rights – or even know they have agency to collect. The truth is, podcasters, like songwriters, are writing and planning original content (their master works) – as are comedians and public speakers and the ability to monetize their creations is legal. “When we talk to our copyright lawyers and people who have created our legal foundation they say they’ve always thought about this and wondered why someone wasn’t collecting for jokes of writers for late night tv, writers for comedy, or even podcasting,” says King. 

Due in large part to issues in metadata and categorical marking across streaming platforms, the ability to track spoken word proves to be a major barrier to adequately support a genre that has not been clearly defined in a trackable technology. Spoken Giant wants to solve for this ecosystem flow gap by incorporating their tracking into the software creators use. “The idea of copyright management and managing that – should be built into the environment,” says Jim King who would like to see Spoken Giant’s tech included in programs like Garageband. 

Partnering with Muserk, an AI administration platform with proprietary pattern matching technology and metadata recognition, Spoken Giants is working to capture every performance they can find. Muserk currently successfully manages millions of works across  YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora.

Spoken Giants’ pilot program which launched in 2019 has collected unclaimed royalties upwards of $100,000 and represents hundreds of members, including Lewis Black, Dan Cummins, Gerry Dee, Pete Holmes, Kyle Kinane, Kathleen Madigan, the Ralphie May Estate, Leanne Morgan, and Theo Von. 

Looking ahead at podcast revenue over the next several years, paid subscriber growth and the percentage of total annual royalty potential, Spoken Giants formula projects a range between $26  million and $51 million on the table for collection. While the stakes may not be as high – or in the billions – as they are in music, the growing spoken word space is on the way to mainstream and solving for creators now could pay off big later.