Business News Labels & Publishers

Association For Electronic Music campaign highlights £100 million missing performance royalties

By | Published on Wednesday 15 October 2014

AFEM

The Association For Electronic Music has launched a campaign to highlight the £100 million in performance royalties it reckons dance music makers are missing out on globally each year, through incomplete or missing data.

The Get Played Get Paid campaign was unveiled yesterday at the Amsterdam Dance Event. In the UK alone, AFEM estimates that PRS and PPL collect £15 million per year in royalties for public plays of dance music in clubs, on radio and elsewhere, but often this is not finding its way to the recording artists and songwriters who made it.

AFEM CEO Mark Lawrence explains: “The problem is that the money collected does not necessarily go to the right people. Part of the problem is down to writers, artists and tracks not being registered at collection societies so the organisations don’t know who to pay, but even more significantly, most societies do not have accurate granular data on what is actually played in clubs. AFEM is working with the electronic music community and the collection society network in an attempt to tackle these problems head-on”.

PRS itself previously recognised that many dance music creators were not registered with the collecting society system and launched the Amplify campaign to encourage them to sign up. Meanwhile, the problem of incomplete reporting into the collective licensing system from the clubbing space has been a contentious topic in the dance music community for a while.

Various companies have been attempting to address the problem with technological solutions, ie bits of kit that automatically monitor what music is played in clubs and report back to the collecting societies. Irish tech firm Future Music Audio began testing such a system called GeoTrack ID earlier this year, while AFEM has partnered with Pioneer’s KUVO system on its campaign. Pioneer is also working with Richie Hawtin’s RADR.dj platform.

Ensuring that all these different technologies adopt some sort of global standard is another aim of the campaign, said Lawrence: “We want to make sure, even if a number of solutions are adopted around the world, that there is dialogue across the music industry and the value of misallocated electronic music royalties is reduced significantly”.



READ MORE ABOUT: |