Songwriters benefit from Warner Chappell's investment in rights management infrastructure

03 March 2025 - Press release

 

Songwriters signed worldwide to Warner Chappell Music, the music publishing arm of Warner Music Group, are now benefiting from an acceleration of payments and more transparent accounting after the publisher invested heavily in its rights management systems and overhauled its global team structure.

The improvements have been spearheaded by Aidan Kenny, WCM's SVP, Global Head of Rights & Royalties, who joined the company last year, reporting to Claire McAuley, WCM's EVP of Global Rights Management.  

Kenny joined Warner Chappell after spending more than a dozen years at BMG Rights Management, ending his time there as SVP, Rights Management and Royalty Services.  In total, he has worked in the industry for more than 25 years, also holding roles at Universal Music Group and EMI Music Publishing. 

Since joining the publisher, Kenny has built a newly created Global Royalty Processing Department, unifying operations worldwide that process inbound royalty distributions into one central team.  He is partnering with stakeholders across legal, finance, administration and digital licensing to evolve Warner Chappell's approach to how it monetises its rights.

Kenny has led a series of initiatives designed to significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of its global royalty processing.  These have focused on streamlining cash receipt management, reconciliation, data loading, and matching processes.  

Warner Chappell's system leverages advanced front-end data loading processes. By extracting and uploading relevant data from incoming files prior to processing, and backed by a newly developed algorithm, it achieves a higher-than-average match rate, which expedites revenue flow and accelerates client royalty calculations. 

The publisher has also introduced quarterly processing and closing which speeds up the movement of income through its systems.  By harnessing Warner Music Group's in-house tech team, Warner Chappell has significantly reduced reliance on third-party systems, enabling the development of proprietary technology that gets songwriters paid more, faster.

Warner Chappell is also working with collection societies to improve the quality of data that it's ingesting and recently held a "match-a-thon" event to further refine matching accuracy and pay out more held income to its writers.

Aidan Kenny says: "All our efforts are geared towards streamlining operations, improving data integrity, enhancing collaboration and greater transparency for rights holders.  I'm genuinely excited by the capabilities of Warner Chappell's royalty processing engine.  The ability to instantly calculate royalties on both domestic and international earnings, without reprocessing, is a major advancement and a huge benefit to songwriters."

Claire McAuley adds: "Aidan has made a huge impact at Warner Chappell since he joined the team last year.  He came to us with an amazing track record at navigating the complexities of rights management and our writers are already benefiting from his expertise.  We're working with collection societies, DSPs and digital processing partners to streamline systems and processes so that the whole industry ups its game when it comes to paying rightsholders accurately, transparently and within the shortest time frames possible."