NAMES AND CREDITS

A stage name is not a writer

A stage name is a brand. The MLC’s writer line wants a person: a legal name with an IPI number behind it. Put the brand where the person goes and the share has no one to land on.

The line that looks right

Juicy J’s “Certified Freak” has a registration at the MLC whose writer line reads JUICY J. Anyone in the business would say that’s correct. The MLC’s system doesn’t know who Juicy J is. It knows Jordan Houston, IPI on file, and it knows that “JUICY J” is a string of letters with no IPI attached. Those are two different parties, and only one of them can be paid.

This is the most common way a share goes missing on a registration that otherwise looks fine. The stage name is on the credits, on the artwork, in the metadata the distributor sent. It gets typed onto the registration because it is the name everyone uses. The registration is accepted. The recordings are matched. The share under “JUICY J” sits.

Where it comes from

• Distributors and DIY services register works from the release metadata, and release metadata carries artist names, not legal names.
• Co-writers and managers fill in the name they know.
• Producers are the worst hit. A producer who writes is usually credited under a producer tag, and the producer tag is never a legal name.

Ari Herstand ran into this in his own catalog: songs registered under “Ari Herstand” instead of “Ari Seth Herstand,” the songwriter name his IPI is attached to.

Why it doesn’t fix itself

The MLC doesn’t map stage names to people. It can’t: a stage name isn’t unique, and the same person can have several. So the line stays as typed, and the share stays unclaimed, until someone who knows both names tells the MLC they are the same person.