PANEL - Know Your Rights
Understanding your rights is essential to protecting and maximizing your music income. This panel brings together experts from The MLC, SoundExchange, TuneCore Publishing, and The Mezzo Agency to break down what every artist and manager needs to know about royalties, rights management, and navigating the complexities of today’s music ecosystem.
Featured Speakers:
Lindsey Major, Chief Member Experience Officer, The MLC
Lindsey Major serves as Chief Member Experience Officer for the Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC), where she is responsible for designing, implementing, and delivering world class experiences to The MLC's diverse and growing Membership base. Her multifaceted leadership ensures that The MLC remains at the forefront of innovation and excellence in serving its 60,000+ Members.
Before joining The MLC, Major held key roles at companies such as Fairygodboss, SmileDirectClub, and Lyft, where she developed and enhanced their customer experience operations, creating effective staff training programs, designing and improving processes, and building innovative support tools to improve quality interactions. Major earned a B.A. from the University of Iowa, an MBA from Belmont University, and a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt from the Six Sigma Global Institute.
Recognized for her leadership and contributions, Major was honored with the 2023 Nashville Emerging Leader Award for Arts, Entertainment, and Music Business. Additionally, she was named a finalist for Music Business Association’s NEXTGEN_NOW One to Watch award in 2023 and 2025 and a finalist for CX Leader of the Year for CMSWire’s IMPACT Awards in 2025. In addition to her internal contributions, Major often represents The MLC at industry events, educating stakeholders about The MLC’s mission and the processes for registering and claiming songs. Her efforts have supported The MLC’s consistent track record of timely royalty distributions each month, with over $3 billion in total royalties distributed.
Outside of her professional work, she is an active volunteer with animal rescues in the Nashville area, including the Nashville Humane Association, and is passionate about supporting environmental conservation, ocean protection, gender equality, and diversity and inclusion initiatives through volunteer work and philanthropy.
Jesus Gonzalez, VP Creative, Latin, BMI
Jesus Gonzalez is the Vice President, Creative, Latin, at BMI®. Based out of Miami, he oversees the Latin Creative team, helping to sign and develop new talent, assist BMI’s family of songwriters and publishers, and serve as a liaison between the Latin music community and the industry at large. Gonzalez also spearheads countless initiatives for the company including hosting BMI’s annual Latin Awards, curating showcases, moderating panels and working with industry partners to support and develop the careers of BMI’s Latin roster. Some high-profile signings and retentions under Gonzalez include Peso Pluma, Edgar Barrera, Bizarrap, Ryan Castro and Alvaro Diaz, among others. He’s also been featured on Billboard’s Latin Power Players List in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Prior to joining BMI in 2021, Gonzalez spent nearly seven years at Universal Music Group, where he was most recently Senior Vice President of Brands & Partnerships. In that role, he spearheaded major collaborations between top Latin artists and global Fortune 500 companies, developed marketing plans around releases to amplify those partnerships and forecasted industry trends. During his tenure at Universal, he helped secure deals for internationally acclaimed performing songwriters, including J Balvin, Juanes and Luis Fonsi, with top brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi and Mastercard, to name a few. Other roles include a stint as Vice President of Music Partnerships working with Rogers & Cowan, FRUKT and Octagon under the Interpublic umbrella, and he was the Principal partner at Maleco Music, a music and brand consulting agency. As a songwriter, Gonzalez played his first showcase at the BMI SXSW stage in 2005 and was a recording artist from 2003-2009. He is a member of the Recording Academy for the GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY Awards. Gonzalez received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of California, Riverside.
Jessica Roffe, Assoc. Director, Artist & Industry Relations, SoundExchange
Jessica Roffe is an Associate Director on the Industry Relations team at SoundExchange.
An accomplished executive with artist relations, brand marketing, TV/film production, and royalty distribution experience, Roffe has built a strong and diverse network gained through multi-faceted roles at MTV and MTV Tr3s, BMI, NBCUniversal/Telemundo, and HBO’s A Tiny Audience.
Moderator: Emily White - Founder & CEO, #iVoted Concerts & Festival; Author & Podcast Host
Emily White is the Founder and CEO of #iVoted Concerts and a Founding Partner at Collective Entertainment in New York City. #iVoted produces data-driven concerts on election nights and during early voting periods that the public enters with a selfie from outside their polling place. White is a Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute with the mission of strengthening global democracy. Through this work White and SNF Agora Institute have analyzed the data on the top trending artists in key locations, whose electoral margins are often decided by the size of a concert venue, to determine which artists increase civic impact the most by comparing fan demographic data with local voter files. #iVoted and SNF Agora are currently developing a tool that shows where any artist increases civic impact the most. White is also an Amazon #1 best-selling author of How to Build a Sustainable Music Career & Collect All Revenue Streams and hosts the #1 Music Business podcast globally of the same name. She’s a 2020 Billboard Woman of the Year, has been on the covers of both Pollstar Magazine and Billboard and has proudly served on the boards of Well-Dunn, Future of Music, CASH Music, SXSW, The David Lynch Foundation Live while additionally serving on The Recording Academy’s Education Committee and Pandora’s Artist Advisory Council.