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Dubai SoundCity: Middle East market has real potential for music rights owners
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 5 November 2009
The music rights market in the Middle East has great potential, though it is sync rights that are currently generating the serious money. Moves are afoot, however, to form some sort of collecting society, in the United Arab Emirates at least, which could result in new revenues for labels and publishers with operations in the territory.
That was the message from Fairwood Music’s Hussain Spek Yoosuf, and as MD of pretty much the only serious music publishing firm in the region he should now. He was speaking on day one of the Dubai SoundCity convention, leading a debate on the opportunities and challenges for Western music rights owners eager to capitalise on emerging markets in this part of the world.
“There is a copyright framework here in the UAE”, Yoosuf explained, “it was introduced into federal law in 2002. The issue, of course, is enforcement. We have no collecting societies, and while in theory we are due both mechanical and performance royalties, there is no precedent for enforcing these rights. And given the biggest users of our content are the big media companies here, many of which are at least partly state owned, it is questionable if anyone would want to enforce them”.
However Yoosuf has been able to build his business by capitalising on the potential of the sync rights business, licensing music to local advertising agencies whose clients – mutli-national brands – are more easily convinced of the need to pay for the music they utilise, even if there is no precedent in the region of enforcing music rights through the courts.
“Government here recognises the value of developing a more publisher friendly copyright system”, Yoosuf added, “because doing so will encourage major content owners to expand into this market, and invest in the region. We currently represent both EMI and Universal’s publishing catalogues in this territory, but obviously if the market matured they’d look to have their own bases here”.
“But things take time, and often move slowly”, he continued. “That said, there’s possibly an analogy with the growth of physical property here. Where there’s building development, it often seems like you stare at desert for fives years, and then a building appears in just two months. I think the same may prove be the case with the development of the intellectual property industry out here too”.
Certainly if Yoosuf and his like can find a way to develop a collecting society system that can work in this region – and it is very much on their agenda – then a more tangible music business could well grow out of the desert pretty damn quickly.
But is there an appetite for Western Music in the Middle East on a cultural level? That was the question posed by Deltasonic Records MD Alan Wills. Even if a more workable copyright enforcement system came into being, would the local population want to consume non-native content? True all the radio stations here play primarily music by Anglo-American artists, but is that aimed at the natives or the very large ex-Pat community?
“I think there is an appetite among nationals”, Yoosuf countered. “Put it this way, whenever I stop at a traffic light there seems to be an Emirati in the car next to mine listening to 50 Cent! Like in many music markets, the Anglo-American catalogue very much crosses into this territory. Which is why the Western music business has much to gain if and when our copyright system matures”.
