Imogen Heap Launches ‘Life of a Song’ Project To Emphasise How Artists Are Compensated

British artist Imogen Heap has launched ‘Life of a Song’ project, which focuses on a single track that she released back in 2005 called, ‘Hide and Seek’, showing exactly how one song has made money over the last 13 years, and how those revenues have been split between Heap, her label, publisher and other entities involved in the work.

The song has made more than £787k over its lifetime so far, according to the project. The artist and her Mycelia organization worked with creative agency Aesop on the website, which will hopefully help other creatives to think about the issues around music rights and data.

“In the data-driven era, the movement of music its metadata and money should be fair and frictionless,” she said as the site was about to go live. “One day I hope for a music ecosystem that supports all music makers, however small or large their contribution and that the LOAS platform will be part of that transformation.”

Loudest take  Although the 'Life of a Song' project is specific to one artist and one song, the contracts and the set-up might be familiar to most musicians/ songwriters. Currently, the music-makers are the last person in the value chain and there is notable exploitation of copyright and remuneration which is mostly never resolved. This case study serves as a great point of reference for anyone interested in how money flows in the music industry. Ultimately, the data is to be made open source, available for personal use for people to highlight and address research and development solutions to problems related to revenue and copyrights in the music industry. The main objective of the portal is to encourage Call for Action (CFA) across the music industry and for individual purposes. The website breaks down revenue across categories like Broadcast, Digital, Live, Physical, Public Performance, Sheet, Synchronisation and Other.