What do performing rights organizations do

A case in point is the controversy surrounding the Fairness in Music Licensing Act. Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, this bill in Despite protest from the music industry, particularly the PROs, the purpose of the bill was to exempt restaurants that are smaller than 3, gross square feet, and retailers smaller than 2, gross square feet, from paying performance royalties for their use of radio and TV music.

During debate over this legislation, many commentators noted that the bill would put the US in conflict with existing international treaties regarding copyright law. The WTO eventually determined that the law was, in fact, such a violation, and ruled that the US would have to compensate European songwriters and publishers financially for lost income in the US.

So, although American songwriters, composers, and music publishers will continue to feel the impact of lessened performance royalties due to the Fairness in Music Licensing Act, the US government is going to use taxpayer dollars to underwrite the promotion of foreign interests. This has obviously been a rallying point for the PROs and their constituency. For the first time, sound recording copyright owners would be given performance rights for music that is transmitted digitally.

Over the next few decades, such new forms of media could replace traditional radio. This raises the question of who will collect what could be a potentially great source of performance income? This is a major victory for recording artists. Although these are complex issues, what remains clear is that the PROs have shown that they have consistently tried to meet the challenges in this new highly digitized and globalized music marketplace to insure that the creative community will not be pushed aside.

Walter F. McDonough is an entertainment and intellectual property attorney based in Boston, Massachusetts He is the General Counsel and one of the co-founders of the Future of Music Coalition, a Washington DC based think tank dedicated to the study of the music business from the perspective of recording artists, songwriters, technologists, music librarians, and consumers.

McDonough is also an artist representative on the Sound Exchange board. You can reach him at walter [at] futureofmusic [dot] org. You need not write her to convince her of these obvious points. She is also hoping to appeal to the idealism of entrepreneurial internet explorers, some of whom may not, may never have been, or may never be, idealistic.

Walter McDonough. Tuesday, February 26, Related Campaign:. They rely heavily on tunes from talented artists like yourself to convey their identity and create an ambiance that keeps customers coming back. The average store is open for sixty-six hours a week. Considering the average song lasts three minutes and 30 seconds , most stores will play around 1, songs a week. For the role your music plays in supporting such business, you deserve to be fairly compensated. So how do you track the plays?

How do you establish a fair rate? What artist in their right mind wants to deal with more email threads? Enter PROs. PROs deal in cataloging, licensing, and collecting performance royalties. Simply put, whenever someone performs or plays your music in public with the intention of generating a profit, you are owed a performance royalty. For example, a band covering your latest single at a concert venue would generate a royalty that a PRO would count.

A store employee cueing your album to attract customers would count towards your performance royalties. The same employee listening to you in the car on their way home would not. As you can imagine, businesses like stores, venues, and radio stations that rely on a constant stream of music generates a huge amount of performance royalties.

Performance royalties are easily confused with other kinds. Becoming familiar with the following music usages and their key differences can help you get the most out of your relationship with your PRO.

Each PRO maintains a catalog of songs from its artists. Rather than dealing in individual tracks, businesses can purchase a license from each PRO that grants them unlimited access to their respective libraries.

Through continued contact with their licensees, a performance rights organization can track which songs are played where, so they can proportionally distribute their fees among the musicians in their roster. The first step to joining a PRO is to sign up as either a writer, a publisher, or both. To properly define them, we must talk a bit more about music copyrighting. Whenever a song is released, it generates two copyrights: copyright for composition and copyright for the sound recording.

Admittedly, the latter deals with royalties due to recording artists owners of the master copyright , and not songwriters, which are the main focus of the article. So, such unified collections societies are often still referred to as PROs, ignoring the fact that they also collect mechanical royalties, and creating a great deal of confusion along the way. In general, all of them collect public performance royalties due to songwriters for the public performance of their music in any sort of commercial environment.

However, regardless of the exact royalty type s managed by the PRO or, should we say, CMO , the principal functions and duties of such bodies remain the same. Those are:. Depending on the type of music user, this process can be very different.

Radio broadcasters, for example, get blanket licenses, allowing them to play virtually all music in the world based on a flat yearly fee paid to their local PRO. The licenses for streaming services, on the other hand, are defined in the process of negotiation between publishers, PROs, and legislative bodies like CRB in the US. Those reports can take various shapes or forms, depending on the type of use: broadcast logs for radio broadcasters, cue sheets for TV channels, set-lists for live venues, and consumption reports for streaming services.

However, none of those reporting systems are perfect. In the US, only top highest-grossing live venues identified by Pollstar report the songs played to the PROs, which then extrapolate that data on the entire live venue landscape. Radio broadcast logs are full of corrupted metadata and human errors — so the PROs usually combine the radio reports with airplay tracking data to get a report of the local airplay.

And even going through all those hoops, PROs are never able to get complete data on all music used in the country. Then, finally, the PRO will use the data collected to distribute the money it receives from music users to the proper songwriters.

That is no small feat, even if you talk about a single market. Now, think about what it takes to claim the royalties of a prominent international artist. On paper, most PROs in the world have long-established partnerships between themselves, exchanging royalties and usage reports to connect the airplay in one country to a songwriter in another. Here are some of the organizations you ought to get familiar with:.

Representing over k songwriters, composers, and music publishers, ASCAP claims to license a catalog of over Established back in , ASCAP is considered to be the first-ever organization, set out to protect the rights of composers and collect public performance royalties on their behalf.

Today, they are the biggest PRO on the market, representing a catalog of over 15 million compositions.