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 Education & Events The Great Escape 2014 Top Stories
Neighbouring rights under the spotlight at The Great Escape next week
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 30 April 2014
So-called neighbouring rights will be under the spotlight at The Great Escape convention next week, and in particular how featured artists and session musicians benefit from this copyright-based revenue stream, and what they could be doing to ensure they receive every penny they are due.
The session will feature the CEO of the UK record industry’s collecting organisation PPL, Peter Leatham, plus Featured Artists Coalition co-CEO Crispin Hunt and Ann Tausis, MD of Kobalt Neighbouring Rights, which helps numerous musicians manage this revenue stream. And ahead of the session, CMU Business Editor Chris Cooke has been speaking to Tausis to get a little background.
She explains: “The term ‘neighbouring rights’ refers to a form of copyright linked to commercially released recordings. Both the owner of those master recordings, which is usually a record label – referred to in copyright law as the ‘producer’ – and the performing artists who appear on the recording – so any singers, instrumentalists and, if they play on the track, the studio producer – are entitled to a royalty when recordings they have contributed to are broadcast on the radio, on TV or are performed in public, for instance in restaurants, bars and shops. It is an ‘economic right’, in the sense that when recorded music is used in this way by people and companies to make money, performing artists and labels can claim remuneration”.
Asked how the ‘neighbouring rights system’ knows which musicians are due royalties from what recordings, she goes on: “This is quite a complex process. Put simply, a rightsholder needs to provide collecting societies information about participating musicians on a recording including which instruments each person played. The societies then use a set method – which varies from society to society – for calculating what royalties are due to each performer based on the amount of airplay that has been reported to them by commercial broadcasters and others who play recorded music in public”.
Cooke will host Maximising Music Rights, the insights strand in which neighbouring rights will be explained. Also in that strand, which is supported by both PPL and PRS For Music, will be a discussion on how labels are now policing the distribution of their content online on a day-to-day basis, plus an interview with Mike Weatherley MP, David Cameron’s IP Advisor.
Find out more about the strand here, and read the full interview with Tausis here.
