It's been one-and-a-half years since composer 2 Mello was paid royalties for his contributions to Celeste B-Sides, a collection of remixed songs from the Celeste soundtrack. The publishing rights for Celeste B-Sides was handed over from original soundtrack composer Lena Raine to Materia Collection in July of 2019, and since then, 2 Mello hasn't received any royalties for any song or album sales.
And he's not alone. "At least three other B-sides remix artists I've talked to have also not been paid by Materia since July," 2 Mello wrote on Twitter. "I inquired about this in October 2020, was told there were outstanding royalties for me, but have had no updates since November."
After three messages without a reply, 2 Mello took to Twitter to get help. As first reported by PC Gamer, this started a cascade of artists looking into their payments and realizing that Materia Collective hasn't been paying their bills.
"I'm aware that five out of seven of the artists involved in the B-Sides album are in the exact same situation as me," 2 Mello told PC Gamer. He estimates that there are "over a dozen artists" with similar stories.
Laura Intravia (Destiny 2, Mortal Kombat 11) had 13 months of missed payments, while Alex Parish (ZED) also hadn't received any payments since July of 2019.
To their credit, Materia Collective did reply quickly to the social media outcry. "We want to acknowledge the concerns about missing royalties related to Celeste B-Sides," the company said. "This was an error, not intentional withholding, but it should not have happened. We apologize, and are in the process of resolving this."
Materia Collective blamed antiquated accounting software and an understaffed reporting team for the delayed payments. An official statement from CEO Sebastian Wolff offered a larger apology to all artists that had been shortchanged by Materia Collective and promised to have all payments "caught up by the next reporting period in mid-February."
However, 2 Mello was not impressed with the apology. "I'm disgusted Materia allowed their single biggest responsibility as a music label to slip for this long, and that they relied on the silence of artists to act as a cover for these internal slip-ups," he said.
Source: Twitter, PC Gamer