Finding the royalties you’re missing: How Mogul is bringing transparency to music payments

For many artists, getting paid isn’t as simple as releasing music and watching the checks roll in. Royalties are often scattered across platforms, collection societies, and rights organizations, making it difficult to know what you’re owed, what’s been paid, and what’s been missed entirely. 

That’s where Mogul comes in. Mogul is a platform that enables artists and managers to track, organize, and identify missing royalties across their entire catalog. Since launch, the tool has tracked $3.5 million in previously unidentified revenue.  

We sat down with Jeff Ponchick, Mogul cofounder and former SoundCloud executive, to discuss the royalty challenges artists face today—and how tools like Mogul can help artists take control of their music businesses and unlock revenue they didn’t even know existed. 

What is the problem in the industry that Mogul solves and how are artists using Mogul to advance their careers?  

Jeff Ponchick: The music industry is incredibly fragmented. It's not like you sign to Universal Music and they pay you 100% of your royalties. What we've learned is that most artists have upwards of 10 different companies who collect on a portion of their total royalties, and that each service has a different way of collecting your rights metadata, has different payout schedules, implements different dispute and resolution processes etc.  

What Mogul does is centralize all of these logins so that artists have all of their publishing and sound recording royalty data in one place, then makes sure that your royalties are accounted for correctly across all rights types. When we find issues, we provide hands-on services to collect the necessary information, fix registrations, and ensure artists are getting paid as much as they should be. 

Quite simply, we’re trying to help people understand what the heck is going on with their royalty businesses and then fix the issues. 

Is Mogul useful for artists and labels at any size, or should they be earning a certain level of income before signing up? 

JP: Currently, Mogul is best for artists who earn more than $500 a year in royalties. We also work with management and business management companies who oversee multiple artists and catalogs. 

How does Mogul identify and find unclaimed royalties? 

JP: Mogul has two approaches. The first is making sure all registrations are present across all rights types and that income is flowing correctly. Believe it or not, on average, over 50% of our artists’ catalogs are not correctly registered when they sign up—whether that’s with their PRO, SoundExchange, the MLC, or elsewhere. This is a much bigger problem than most people in the industry realize. 

The second approach is pivoting data from third-party datasets to identify black box royalties, which is money that has been collected but not properly matched to the right creators. 

What is Mogul’s view on AI-generated music and how it may impact royalties and copyrights? 

JP: With an influx of new people creating music via AI, Mogul is positioned downstream to help them.  

When these songs hit streaming platforms and generate distribution royalties, often these creators will try to figure out how to increase these earnings in other rights verticals such as publishing or neighboring rights. While we are poised to help these new creators, the jury is still out on if this is ethical, fair, or even legal to do. It's uncharted territory which is of course interesting and exciting.  

Recently BMI announced that they are open to registrations of partially AI generated music which has aided in the production of original music but not a fully AI generated track. At Mogul we are watching as regulation and policies unfold and will comply with whatever the music industry decides to do. 

What's the best way for somebody to start exploring Mogul's services? 

JP: It's easy. Visit usemogul.com to sign up or try our free royalty finder here to see if you might have any unmatched mechanical publishing royalties out there for you.