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
US publishing chief calls for more collective licensing
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 20 June 2011
The CEO of the US National Music Publishers Association has called on his sector to endorse more collective licensing in the digital domain, especially for so called mechanical rights, and for sync rights that cover things like the uploading of home made videos to YouTube that included published music.
According to Billboard, speaking at his body’s AGM, David Israelite said that mechanical and some sync rights should be licensed collectively in the US – like performance rights generally are via BMI, ASCAP and SESAC – to ensure promising new digital music services can get to market. Some digital start-ups complain that the overly complex licensing system, and demands made by some rights owners for advances and equity, stop them from launching.
Israelite told his members: “If you look at the challenges of the industry, the way we license doesn’t work: it is broken”. He pointed to a bit of legislation considered by US Congress in 2006 which, he says, provided a good framework for such extended collective licensing.
The issue of digital licensing is more contentious than ever in the music business, with some supporting the introduction of collective licensing – via societies and licensing agencies – across the board for both recording and publishing rights, while others feel rights owners should retain the right to negotiate their own terms with digital services, including advances and other upfront incentives.
Some also say that a collecting society system, where licence negotiations have to take place on a country by country basis, would actually be more problematic for globally focused digital start ups than dealing with the big rights owners who, in theory (though often not in practice) can provide worldwide agreements.
In the UK, where PRS oversees both performance and mechanical rights in the non-digital domain, some publishers have nevertheless decided to keep mechanicals out of the collective licensing system when it comes to digital, a move criticised at The Great Escape last month by BASCA chief Patrick Rackow.
Back in the US, EMI recently did the opposite of what Israelite wants, and took some of its performing rights out of the collective licensing system to be managed in-house. Expect this debate to rumble on for some time.
