It’s easy to forget that PRS for Music is a not for profit company, as are ASCAP and BMI in the US. However, the 3rd performing rights body in America, SESAC, is a for-profit firm, and are now on the market for a cool $500 million. Warner being interested does raise the question of conflict of interest, so we watch with baited breath….
CMU posted this interesting timeline tracking the sale of EMI
http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/timeline-emisale/
My last holiday book was ‘The 4 Hour Work Week‘ by Timothy Ferriss. It’s a tale of how to make it big, how to automate everything, and how to take yourself out of the constant back and forth of emails, meetings and all that day to day stuff.
One of its key principles is the application of the 80/20 rule – 20% of the input gives 80% of the output, 20% of customers generate 80% of the revenue, etc.
The idea conveyed in the book is that 80/20 can be applied anywhere – your friends, your wardrobe, your business, your record collection…..
Whilst I haven’t deleted 80% of my friend’s phone numbers from my address book, maybe this principal could be applied to a business area, as Andrew Dubber proposes in this post on his website;
http://andrewdubber.com/2010/06/how-to-solve-royalty-collection-societies/
Interesting idea, not flawless, but then what is…. For independent writers the prospect of an extra £2500 each year would most likely go down very well, but whether it works for everyone is another story….
Thanks to Adrian Fusiarski (Buzzsonic) for posting this via Twitter
A&R stands for Artist and Repertoire. It involves finding new talented songwriters and composers and supporting them as they develop their skills.
Exploitation is the licensing and marketing of a copyright. The most common way of exploiting a copyright is through sync. Sync is the synchronisation of a composition and a sound recording with a visual, whether it is a TV show, Film or a Video Game.
Administration includes registering the songs with mechanical and performing rights societies, collecting and distributing royalties and issuing licenses to those who want to use your music.
Royalties are owed to songwriters from the various uses of their compositions. These royalties come in the form of Mechanicals and Performance. Mechanicals are royalties from the pressing (not sale) of a composition and a Performance Royalties comes from the use of a composition on TV and Radio and Live.
This article popped up in our inboxes last week, courtesy of the Music Week daily
http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?storycode=1042162
It’s a viewpoint we agree with – the long tail is (pretty much) proven in other areas, so why not licensing? The main question with it is how to make it quick and easy on a practical level – we still haven’t worked that bit out yet.
Incidentally, the author of this post, Gary Shenk, is at a company called Greenlight Rights in LA – they do all sorts of rights representation, from Andy Warhol to the London Eye, and music is just one of their specialities. An interesting business model indeed….