Canadian songwriter collecting society SOCAN has acquired CMRRA, the Canadian mechanical rights organisation, which has been owned by US collecting society SoundExchange since 2017. It means most of the collective licensing of song rights in Canada - both performing rights and mechanical rights - will now sit within one organisation.
That move, according to SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown, will “strengthen Canada’s music rights landscape and build a more seamless experience for music publishers and creators”. By bringing SOCAN and CMRRA together, she adds, “we have an opportunity to harness our respective strengths and support long-term growth”.
CMRRA President Paul Shaver says the deal provides “an exciting opportunity” to build on work done while the society was owned by SoundExchange, and to “drive innovation, deepen our service to music publishers and self-published songwriters, and contribute to a more integrated and effective rights administration ecosystem in Canada”.
When it comes to the copyright in songs, the music industry has often managed separately and differently the ‘performing rights’ - which are exploited when music is performed, broadcast or made available online - and the ‘mechanical rights’ (or ‘reproduction rights’) - which are exploited when music is copied onto physical discs, or into audio-visual productions, or via digital platforms.
In Anglo-American markets like the UK and Canada, songwriters usually assign the performing rights in their songs to a collecting society, like PRS or SOCAN. The societies then issue the licences to, and collect money from, third parties that perform or broadcast the music and pass the money back to the writer. If the writer then signs with a publisher, a share of that money will be paid to the publisher directly.
But when it comes to mechanical rights, many writers assign or license that element of their copyrights to a music publisher through a publishing deal. When third parties - like record labels, broadcasters or streaming platforms - want to exploit the mechanical rights, sometimes the publishers do direct deals, other times they allow a mechanical rights collecting society to issue a licence.
Which is why in Anglo-American markets you end up with different collecting societies for performing and mechanical rights. In the UK that’s PRS and MCPS. Songwriters assign their performing rights to PRS. Meanwhile publishers - and self-published writers - join MCPS, which is owned by the Music Publishers Association, and which handles the licensing of mechanical rights in various scenarios.
In Canada there used to be two mechanical rights societies - CMRRA which primarily represented English language repertoire and SODRAC which primarily represented French language repertoire. SOCAN, as Canada’s performing rights society, bought SODRAC back in 2018. Which means as an organisation it has also been involved in the licensing of mechanical rights, for some repertoire, for eight years.
CMRRA was previously an independent licensing collective before being acquired by SoundExchange in 2017. SoundExchange is best known as the record industry collecting society in the US, representing record labels and performers, and mainly administering the compulsory licence that covers the use of sound recordings by satellite and online broadcasters within the USA. The CMRRA acquisition in 2017 saw SoundExchange also move into publishing rights.
In many ways it makes sense for the licensing of performing rights and mechanical rights to sit within one organisation. In the pre-digital age, the customers of performing and mechanical rights were generally different. Record labels were the primary customers on the mechanical rights side, needing licences covering songs on the CDs and records they released. Radio stations and venues were key customers on the performing rights side.
But with most digital platforms, both mechanical rights and performing rights are being exploited at the same time. And other increasingly important customers, like TV companies, are also exploiting both sets of rights. That’s why in the UK, although PRS and MCPS remain separate organisations, they work very closely together and offer joined up licences for some uses of music that exploit both sides of the copyright.
And now in Canada there will be a single collecting society issuing licences for both performing rights and mechanical rights for most of the repertoire.
An official announcement of SOCAN’s purchase of CMRRA, which is still subject to regulatory approval, says, “The proposed acquisition brings together SOCAN’s century-long leadership in performing rights administration and advocacy – alongside nearly a decade of reproduction rights expertise – with CMRRA’s more than 50 years of specialised expertise in reproduction rights”.