CEO/Founder
Sound Royalties, LLC
Years with Company: 3
Address: 1641 Worthington Rd., Suite 410, West Palm Beach, FL 33409
Phone: 1-844-4ALL Music
Web: soundroyalties.com
Email: [email protected]
Clients: Priscilla Renea, Kevin Lyttle, the Mad Stuntman.
BACKGROUND
A classically trained pianist, Alex Heiche switched to financing after realizing stardom wasn’t his fate. Unlike other entertainment financing instruments, Sound Royalties offers advances based around proven earnings without seeking to own copyrights.
Fixing Financing
In 1997, I read about Bowie Bonds and found it very interesting. Then, I started talking with friends in the music community and saw some of the things that were going on—people selling their rights in perpetuity, which nobody should ever do. In 2003, I started funding the entertainment community. That slowly evolved and in 2013 I was able to focus exclusively on fixing some things about this industry in terms of funding and financing.
Projecting Royalties
We’re a specialty-financing firm. The key is it’s non-credit based advances that use royalty and income streams as collateral. We’ve become really adept at seeing anomalies and missing royalties in people’s income streams.
Typically, we’ll look at someone’s historical income over the past three years. From that, we’ll project what they’re going to have in the future and what we can use as collateral. When we advance, we don’t do 100% recoupment. What that means is, if they’ve got $10 coming in, we may work with [between] $5 and $8 of it so there’s income still overflowing.
We also have people come to us who have no royalties coming in but they have a hit song that’s been playing since this last summer. It can sometimes take a year for that income stream to flow through to them. We have a lot of new, hit artists and writers who have a song that’s charting.
The Goldilocks Zone
If someone has bad credit, the regulators control what [lenders] can do. Even if someone has a million dollars in assets and wants to give someone a loan, their hands are often tied. On the other end of the spectrum are people who are buying for the next 35-plus years. We came up with a model where we’ll go out six or seven years, not do 100% recoupment and without the intention of owning the copyright.
Just What You Want
A lot of artists and songwriters come to us and say, “I just want to work with my SoundExchange or my TuneCore.” We’re happy to carve that out and work with that exclusively. The beauty of our program is we’re using that as collateral and can’t come back on them personally if that collateral fails.
Bank of You
Because our model’s not buying in perpetuity, we build customers for life. People say to us, “I need more than that”––they think they’re negotiating a sale or a publishing deal. We explain to them, “This $50,000 is just using what you have as collateral. If your song goes up in the charts, you can restructure what you’re doing with us.” And we can work with you again and again.
Information Power
With detailed historical royalty streams, we can give you options and tell you what you qualify for. We can also project what you’re going to earn over the next year. The easiest way to give us those detailed income streams is to provide us with your SoundExchange login and then we can download the statements we need.
