This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Labels & Publishers Legal Top Stories
ASCAP echoes BMI proposals in US publishing system review
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 8 August 2014
ASCAP has now followed BMI in making a submission to the US Department Of Justice’s review of the collective licensing system in American. And song rights collecting society has said much the same as its rival.
As previously reported, BMI said in its statement earlier this week that it believes that music publishers should be allowed to choose what kind of services they licence through their performing right collecting societies, so that they can do direct deals with digital while licensing radio and live through the collective licensing system. The rules currently governing both BMI and ASCAP do not provide that flexibility. Other rules BMI wants changed include giving it the right to represent its members ‘mechanical’ as well as performing rights, and a new way for royalty rate disputes to be resolved.
Yesterday ASCAP echoed all three of those proposals, saying that allowing its members to pick and choose which specific performing rights it handed over to the collecting society to administer was “necessary to hold the system together”. It also argued that being able to license mechanical as well as performing rights is “something that ASCAP’s competitors are already free to do” (smaller rights organisations not being bound by the so called consent decrees that aim to counter the competition concerns inherent in large scale collective licensing).
Commenting, ASCAP President Paul Williams said in a statement: “ASCAP supports the ongoing consent decree review process at the Department Of Justice, and we welcome the opportunity to update our music licensing system to better reflect how people listen to music today. These issues are both urgent and complex, and the volume of comments submitted speaks to that”.
Noting that some digital services, most notably Pandora, were lobbying for the consent decrees to remain as they are, Williams continued: “Everyone agrees that the music landscape has shifted dramatically. Songwriters understand that their futures are at stake and that updating the consent decrees is critical for them. Some music users have found ways to exploit this outdated system. And not surprisingly, they are among the first to defend that status quo”.
Finally, he said: “At the end of the day, ASCAP believes the US must modernise music licensing in order to preserve the benefits of collective licensing to businesses that license music, give consumers greater access to the music they love, and allow the more than 500,000 songwriters, composers, and music publishers we represent to be compensated for the true value their music brings to the marketplace”.
As well as BMI and ASCAP, the Department Of Justice has also asked Universal Music Publishing and Sony/ATV to submit comments, which we expect to see in due course. Meanwhile you can read the full text of ASCAP’s submission to the consent decree review here.
In other ASCAP news, the organisation has announced that it is appealing a rate court decision made earlier this year on the royalty fees streaming service Pandora pays. As previously reported, Pandora was pushing for the amount of its revenues that it pays to ASCAP to be cut to 1.7% with a judge eventually ruling to set the figure at 1.85%. ASCAP had been pushing for 3% (with a 2.5% rate backdated for 2013).
In a statement yesterday, the collecting society said: “ASCAP believes that the district court’s summary judgment misinterprets the ASCAP consent decree and deprives ASCAP’s members of rights expressly granted to them by the copyright law. With respect to the district court’s rate determination, ASCAP’s brief argues that the court set a below-market price for Pandora’s license, resulting from the court’s failure to use recent direct licensing deals as relevant benchmarks”.
Of course, if the DoJ allows the publishers to start licensing digital directly, ASCAP’s legal squabbles with Pandora might become irrelevant, though smaller publishers may continue to rely on the society in the digital domain.
