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PPL to provide international royalty distribution services to Icelandic collecting society
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 9 March 2022
UK record industry collecting society PPL has announced a deal with its Icelandic counterpart, SFH, which will see the latter use the former’s platform for distributing royalties it collects that are due to artists and labels outside of Iceland.
PPL says that, under the new partnership, it will “support SFH with the distribution of royalties to performers and recording rights-holders based outside of Iceland, helping to increase the amount of money distributed by SFH”.
Basically, “SFH will send its airplay data to PPL, who will then identify the performers and recording rights-holders to pay by matching this data against recordings in its 20 million-strong repertoire database”.
The UK society adds that it is confident its involvement in that process will make the payment of international royalties by the Icelandic society more accurate and efficient.
“Early analysis of SFH’s airplay data shows that 97% of recordings played can be auto-matched to a corresponding track in PPL’s database”, it states, “with a further 2% having one or more corresponding tracks to manually match to”.
Confirming the new partnership between PPL and SFH, the CEO of the former, Peter Leathem, says: “I am very happy that SFH have chosen PPL’s Business Services to support the distribution of royalties to performers and recording rights-holders outside of Iceland. International royalty distributions can be difficult for smaller scale [collecting societies] because of the costs and complexities of building the systems and databases required to distribute monies effectively”.
“For a fraction of the cost of such an investment”, he goes on, “SFH can use PPL’s existing market-leading technology and repertoire database, allowing it to accurately distribute money in full to performers and recording rights-holders around the world. Everyone benefits from this deal – the artists and labels who will receive fair royalty payment, and SFH, whose operations will be streamlined and improved”.
Meanwhile SFH MD Gunnar Guðmundsson adds: “It is our aim at SFH to ensure we collect and distribute as much money as possible for the performers and recording rights-holders whose recordings are played in public in Iceland”.
“By using PPL’s Business Services offer, we can do this cheaply and effectively”, he continues. “This not only leaves more money on the table to be distributed but also means more performers and recording rights-holders will be paid. We look forward to working closely with PPL and continuing to deliver a cutting-edge royalty collection and distribution service”.
PPL already provides similar services to a number of other societies around the world, including AGATA in Lithuania, Audiogest in Portugal, EFÜ in Estonia, PPI in Ireland and SWISSPERFORM in Switzerland.
