10094535Black Music and Publishing Royalty Issues - Prototype for ChangeClosedInvestment AcceleratorInnovate UKStreaming platforms have improved the potential for generating revenue for musicians. Black independent artists are collectively owed around £2000 each publishing royalties from streaming activities. Syncd:in was set up in 2021 to serve underrepresented music creators operating within Black music genres in the UK, Africa and the Caribbean to address a barrier that has been found in accessing opportunities for publishing and sync deals due to location and the lack of awareness and resources in this area. We recognise that artists were missing out on vital revenue. As well as the wider cultural and social roles, music is an important creative sector for the UK economy. The CMA Music and Streaming Final Report (2022) recognises royalties to be a primary source of income and describes the barriers to independent artists with regards to publishing royalties. Syncd:in aims to level the playing field for independent artists by facilitating the recoup of this revenue. We want to encourage sustainable productivity and improve economic viability for them to continue their creative profession. At Syncd:in, our objective is to provide a platform for artists to seamlessly submit their tracks and metadata for processing to collect publishing royalties through the Performance Royalty Organisations we are affiliated with. Artists will have the convenience of tracking their registered tracks and monitoring their due payouts on one platform. The project is to build a clickable prototype, through UX/UI design and research, for an automated publishing royalty collection platform, also conducting research on the feasibility of implementing an automated bot to locate artists from our demographic who do not have publishers by querying APIs from PRS and Spotify. The bot functionality will use inbuilt ethical and data protection intelligence to crawl the web for music streaming sites to gather pertinent data, including follower count and streaming metrics from Spotify and Youtube. Automated contact can then be made with these artists to allow them to start the process of onboarding for publishing royalty collection via Syncd:in. Potential competitors are Sentric and Songtrust. Although they are not specifically targeting the same demographics as Synd:in and the issue of unclaimed royalties is not specific to any particular racial or ethnic group, representation and familiarity matters and hard to reach groups need products they can identify with. Our research has shown that the language, tone, imagery and workforce culture of these companies act as a barrier to uptake by black musicians.