We are very excited to announce that CMRRA has developed a new royalty statement format which will provide greater flexibility to all of our clients, while at the same time supporting more extensive data across all areas of royalty distribution. This new statement format will provide a standard that supports all types of distributions, and will enable us to consolidate your royalties each quarter into a single file per royalty source (e.g. Mechanical, Broadcast Mechanical, Online, etc). It will be accompanied by a summary outlining the different types of royalties reported, as well as additional reports containing helpful analytics that will assist you in assessing top earning songs and licensees more quickly. Based on client feedback, the new CSV format will support the need for a user friendly statement file that can be accessed via standard spreadsheet software or parsed for ingestion into more robust database systems when working with larger volumes of data. You can view and/or download the new CMRRA Royalty Statement CSV File Format Layout and User Guide by contacting CMRRA.
The initial launch of the new statement format will include royalties for lines of business processed through our new LDS system. Any processes that are still awaiting conversion from our legacy AS400 system will continue to be reported using the old statement format, and distributed through the traditional means of PDF documents accessed through our legacy CMRRA Direct site, or printed paper statements. This includes royalties for independent labels and private copying distributions. We are working as quickly as possible to transition these remaining areas of distribution to LDS, and will continue to provide updates on the timeline for completion of this later in 2016.
As of March 15, 2016, the new statement format, as well as the new summary reports, will be available ONLY via the new CMRRA Direct for your retrieval. Email notifications will be delivered to advise as soon as these outputs are available to you, thus providing quicker access for all clients to your quarterly statements, and eliminating the need to print and mail paper statements. If you haven’t signed up already for access to the new CMRRA Direct, we encourage you to do so as soon as possible, as this will be the primary means for you to access your statement information going forward.
Please go to CMRRA Direct (https://www.cmrra.ca/) for further information and to sign up for your new account.
Important Note re: Availability of Current CMRRA Direct Royalty Outputs:
In November we announced the new CMRRA Direct site, where your royalty outputs are now available for you to view and download online for all distributions processed via our LDS system. This will include distributions up to and including 3Q2015 which will be available to you after December 15. Please note that once the change to the statement format and summaries is implemented in March, it will no longer be possible for these earlier statement outputs to be accessed via this tool. It is therefore critical that you download any of this data that you may require before March 2016, as you will not be able to retrieve these files after the new format is implemented for the 4Q2015 distribution on March 15, 2016.
