The UK music publishing industry should do more to work with other sectors of the music industry, and especially the record industry. Personally that sounds like no fun to me, who wants to report on industry sectors working in collaboration for mutual commercial and creative gain, when you could be reporting on pointless royalty disputes between major record and publishing companies which are owned by the same people? That's much more fun.
But Paul Curran of the UK's Music Publishers Association, who has just be re-elected to his fourth term in the Chairman position, was keen for more cross-sector partnerships when he spoke at this organisation's AGM in London yesterday. According to Billboard, Curran told his members that all rights holders should join forces to protect their works in the somewhat unpredictable, often unmonitorable digital age. Curran: "Now that audio-visual exploitation is emerging online at a rapid rate, it raises new questions about blanket licensing in this new environment and about the synchronisation rights in user-generated content on [YouTube and MySpace]".
The Association's CEO, Stephen Navin, added: "Consumers think that music is somehow free. So while we've seen the year-on-year decline of the recording industry, we've seen the rise of user-generated content. We need to find ways to synchronise those rights. I have become more and more convinced of the necessity of the closer co-operation between publishers, users, the public and the government".
All of this, Curran and Nevin say, requires more collaboration between music industry associations and collecting societies. Confirming he was now having regular meetings with MCPS-PRS and UK record industry trade body BPI, Curran added: "Having our informal meetings helps us explain to all concerned how the record companies are thinking. Through partnerships, we can make a difference. Otherwise, users [of music] will continue to play us off against each other as they have done in the past".
That sentiment was shared by Emma Pike, the outgoing CEO of the mysterious organisation that is British Music Rights (still haven't worked out what they do, other than not return phone calls, but it's something to do with publishing royalties). She criticised the much previously reported recommendation of the government's Gowers Review on intellectual property with regard to the recorded music copyright, which Gowers said shouldn't be increased from its current fifty years. Although that copyright term doesn't directly affect those in the publishing sector, Pike said that publishers should support the recording rights owners in their bid to win a term. (Such support isn't entirely selfless - one of the record industry's reasons for increasing the term is the imbalance between recording and publishing copyright terms. The extent of the imbalance is unfair, though perhaps the solution to that is to decrease the publishing term, not increase the recordings one. The good news for the publishing sector is that that's not a solution that has been much discussed in the media or political circles, but an increase in the recording copyright term is sure to provide better security for their own royalty period in the long term).
Pike's criticism of the Gowers Review wasn't restricted to recordings though, as she pointed out that some of the other proposals in the report propose "sweeping exemptions for sampling, parodying and caricature" which, she argues, would undermine publishers' revenues also.