PPL visits industry partners in Norway, Belgium and Spain to improve cross-border neighbouring rights revenue flow
In recent weeks PPL has visited a number of our close partners across Europe to discuss further improving how neighbouring rights royalties are distributed around the world, supporting us to maximise royalty revenue for performers and recording rightsholders in the UK and overseas.
GRAMO is Norway’s collective management organisation (CMOs) for recorded music, representing performers and recording rightsholders much like PPL does here in the UK. We met with their team in September to ensure how we work with them maximises revenue for our members, including best practice recording metadata management, distribution policies and claims processes. GRAMO transitioned to using global performer metadata database VRDB to exchange data with other CMOs in 2017, and they were able to demonstrate some of the system improvements and upgrades to VRDB that have taken place in recent years. It was positive to see how these developments have helped GRAMO process PPL’s data more efficiently, resulting in fairer, more accurate distributions for our members.
Also in September we attended a meeting in Belgium organised by SCAPR, the trade body for performer CMOs, to discuss Additional Supplementary Remuneration (ASR). ASR has been in most EU member states’ legislation since 2014 and is the revenue that is due to non-featured performers when recordings they have performed on are used in the extended term of copyright, i.e. more than 50 years since the recording was released. This revenue comprises 20% of a record company’s income from the use of such sound recordings and is paid to a CMO which then distributes it to individual performers.
The administration of this right can be made more effective, thereby increasing revenue for non-featured performers around the world. We have been working with our colleagues in SCAPR to put in place systems and processes that support the collection and distribution of ASR. This will increase non-performer revenue and ultimately grow the total amount of collectively managed performer income.
Finally, we met with AIE and AGEDI in Madrid. Neighbouring rights is administered differently in Spain, with one organisation (AIE) representing performers and another (AGEDI) representing recording rightsholders.
Our meeting with AGEDI was to ensure PPL members are receiving the maximum amount of revenue from the Spanish market. By ensuring recording rightsholder data management processes and distribution policies are as effective as possible, we can ensure PPL member repertoire is fully claimed and linked through for payment from AGEDI.
Both meetings with AGEDI and AIE also looked at the wider Spanish music market and its various rights and tariffs, helping us understand the external factors that can impact our member’s income from Spain.
Our relationships with CMOs and trade bodies in Europe and further afield are crucial to maximising the neighbouring rights revenue we pay to performers and recording rightsholders. The visits in the last month follow on from a productive multi-day working session with Danish CMO Gramex Denmark and will no doubt be followed by more face-to-face meetings around the world as countries continue to open up post-COVID-19.
