What Can Happen When an Artist Asks Their PRO to Prove What They’ve Been Paid
51 German TV placements. Several tracks synced on major TV shows like Love Island, I’m a Celebrity Germany, The Bachelor, and Galileo. More than 2K radio plays and a decade of touring Germany in venues up to 7,000 capacity. All sounds great.
Total lifetime payment from GEMA: €8,510. That might seem like a surprising figure to some and a figure I have got wrong to others.
Add into the above, no breakdowns showing or explaining the usage of any of the above. Not a single line showing what was played, where, or on which platform. There was no way to verify how that figure was arrived at, calculated with what methodology or whether it bore any relationship to the usage data listed above it.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not an accusation. Those are the numbers that one artist received when he spent several years filing formal privacy law data requests with collecting societies across 12 global territories. What came back, when anything came back at all, told a story that the industry does not generally discuss in public.
Johan Loewenthal is an Australian musician. He is a working artist who wanted to understand what he had been paid, and why. Johan thought that something just didn’t feel right and it was time to establish a full version of how these payments are calculated. The process of trying to find out produced written admissions, internal emails between collecting societies, and a forensic data analysis that exposed something the societies themselves have not been able to explain away.
This article reports what those documents show.
About the Author
Ron Pye runs IQ Artist Management, a UK-based practice working with artists on music rights, royalty collection, publishing administration, sync licensing, and career development. He holds an MA in Music Industry Studies with Distinction from the University of Liverpool and a BA in Music Business and Finance. Before returning to music full time, he worked in IT roles at Channel 4, Channel 5, and the BBC.
Publishing and royalty work forms a substantial part of his management practice. He has worked across UK and international collecting societies for years, registering works, querying payments, and dealing with the practical mechanics of how data moves between PROs across different territories. What he has learned about how the international collection system operates has largely come from working through it directly, rather than reading about it.
His MA research at Liverpool examined the legal and technical structures governing how rights are administered globally, including the frameworks that determine what data collecting societies are required to hold, share, and disclose.
The Paper Trail Starts Here
Johan Loewenthal, along with his TORA bandmates has toured Germany for over a decade, sharing stages with acts including Giant Rooks, playing venues up to 7,000 capacity. So, he’s certainly not an artist on the margins of the industry. He’s clearly someone with an established catalogue, documented provenance, and a more than reasonable expectation of being able to audit what he had earned.
The mechanism he used to find out what he was being paid is quite straightforward. In Australia, the Privacy Act gives individuals the right to request personal data held by organisations, including collecting societies. Loewenthal filed requests with PROs across 12 territories, over several years, asking each one to supply the data they held about him: usage records, payment history, the lot.
What followed was a sequence of delays, partial responses, and sometimes even outright refusals. And, some societies ignored the requests entirely. Others responded with data that was incomplete, inconsistent, or, as would later be proven in detail, meaningless. A few required regulatory interventions before complying at all.
SOCAN, the Canadian collecting society, told Loewenthal in writing it would only supply his data if the Privacy Commissioner of Canada compelled it to. Eyebrows raised, he filed a complaint. The Commissioner duly intervened. SOCAN was then forced to comply with the request. What came next, the disclosure, included something Loewenthal was never supposed to see.
What APRA Put in Writing
“We cannot supply the further data sets described in your request, including around transaction level records, usage or detailed methodological documentation. In many cases, we neither hold such information nor hold the authority to obtain it. As noted, the completeness and quality of data we receive varies and usage does not always translate directly to payment. As a result, it is not feasible for us to verify all individual usage to the extent you have suggested, or provide documentation demonstrating that every individual stream, performance, or broadcast of your work has been recorded and accounted for at the level of detail you seek.”
I’ve read the following repeatedly, “We neither hold such information nor hold the authority to obtain it.” This is not a statement about one missing data set. It is APRA describing, in writing, how the international PRO system is built. Local societies distribute on what they receive from partners. They cannot independently verify those figures. When you ask them to prove what they paid you, and why, they cannot, because the underlying data was never theirs to hold, inspect or cross reference.
But it seemingly got worse. When Loewenthal pushed further, APRA supplied data but acknowledged in the same email it might not accurately reflect what he had been paid. So, he did what would come to mind in this circumstance and ran a forensic analysis. He found over 100,000 duplicate lines, the same song showing identical play counts across three platforms in the same month. He proved it was meaningless and sent APRA the analysis. Their response was that they hadn’t been obliged to provide it, and that was as good as it was going to get. Then they also admitted they didn’t hold any of the underlying data at all. So if they don’t hold any of the underlying data? Where exactly do those ‘plays’ originate from?
Is that an admission to potentially fabricated data? Do we have forensic proof of this? What exactly is going on here because each step seemed to confirm the one before it.
The Emails They Didn’t Expect Him to See
On 10th November 2025, APRA sent an email to SOCAN regarding Loewenthal’s data request. The subject line read “PEPIDA”, presumably a misspelling of PIPEDA, Canada’s private sector privacy law. A clerical error in the first of many emails.
The content of the email, it turns out, was not a clerical error.
“We are happy for SOCAN to take the approach of referring Mr Loewenthal back to us as we have provided him already with data to fulfil this request.”
Two days later, on 12th November 2025, SOCAN replied:
“Regarding Loewenthal, as of today it seems like he plans to raise a complaint to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and if their office contacts SOCAN we’ll be obligated to provide his data to him directly. If that comes to pass, we will reach out to keep APRA informed of the process.”
What is happening here is that two collecting societies are coordinating their response to a legal data request. SOCAN stating in writing it would only comply if a regulator forced it to, and then promising to keep APRA posted if that happened.
Loewenthal felt obligated to escalate at this point and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada duly intervened. SOCAN was then legally required to disclose all personal data it held about him under PIPEDA. Those emails mentioned him by name and came out in the forced disclosure.
These documents were not leaked. No source handed them over. The law compelled their release because they contained his personal data. What they revealed was something two organisations had no expectation he would ever read.
The System Was Built This Way
What Loewenthal uncovered is not a failure of one collecting society in one territory. It is how the international PRO network operates. Societies distribute royalties based on pooled and aggregated data passed between organisations through reciprocal agreements. The formulas used to calculate individual payments are not ever disclosed. When usage flows across borders, it moves through trust, not through any verification process.
The industry tried to fix this once. In 2008, the EU Commission launched the Global Repertoire Database initiative, an attempt to build a single, authoritative global database of music ownership to make digital licensing work properly.
By July 2014 it was all over. PRS for Music issued a formal closure statement after six years of development and around £8 million spent. What finished it was a combination of funding arguments, a deadlock over data ownership and control, and technical standards that varied too widely between the participating societies. Some inside accounts suggested certain societies were reluctant to share proprietary data that sat at the very heart of their own operations.
The infrastructure that was intended to be replaced has been processing royalty payments ever since.
So when the music industry told artists throughout the 2010s that streaming had made royalty collection more efficient and traceable, that was not a completely empty claim, but it didn’t extend very far. The data exists at the platform level. What Loewenthal’s investigation shows is that by the time it travels through the international PRO network, the chain of custody breaks down. When he asked for proof, the societies told him they didn’t have it.
Your Right to Ask the Same Question
What APRA and SOCAN did is documented between the two, there is no reflection on any other PRO. How UK collecting societies would respond to the same request is not something this article can answer.
What I can tell you is that you have a legal right to ask.
Under UK GDPR Article 15, retained after Brexit and functionally identical to its EU equivalent, you can submit a Subject Access Request to any organisation that holds personal data about you. That includes your PRO. You are entitled to request all data they hold including usage records, payment histories, correspondence, the purposes for which they use and process your data.
What comes back is between you and your collecting society. This article does not speculate further on what that might look like.
What the Loewenthal Documents Change
Every time I audit an artist’s publishing registrations, the gap between what should have been collected and what has been, is quite often bigger than the artist expected. Missed registrations are common. So is incorrect metadata that causes international collections to fail, silently. And sometimes it’s simply societies holding onto distributions for years without any notifications.
That’s a known problem, and there are ways to address it.
What Loewenthal’s investigation adds is a harder question. Even when registrations are correct, even when metadata is clean and everything looks right on paper, can the collecting societies verify that the amounts they’ve distributed are accurate? APRA’s own correspondence says they can’t. Their own data, when forensically examined, proved to be almost meaningless. Loewenthal has since also filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Publishing Pty Ltd in the Supreme Court of New South Wales.
The starting point of any publishing audit is checking what’s registered and whether the metadata is right. Fix those things and the money usually follows, usually. What his investigation puts underneath all of that is a question the industry is still yet to answer.
Story developing.
