musicians redefine royalty-free music

7/31/2019 Musicians Redefine Royalty-Free Music

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------------------------------------FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE----------------------------------

Royalty-Free Music Is Being Redefined by Musicians Who Forego PRO Membership

(Atlanta, GA May 15, 2012) - As large stock media companies more tightly define what makes a piece of musictruly "royalty-free", many musicians are choosing to forego membership in performing rights organizations (knownas PROs) such as ASCAP (American Society of Composers and Publishers), BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated),or SESAC (Society of European Stage Authors and Composers), among other international organizations.

PROs were originally organized in the early twentieth century to protect the rights of musicians whose compositionswere being performed in public for commercial gain (i.e., radio, television, sporting events, business meetings, etc.).Once these artists united and began charging fees for such usage, a new type of royalty stream was created, knownas the performance royalty. To composers, this type of royalty was separate from the mechanical royalties theyearned through record sales and printed sheet music sales.

As an example of how significant performance royalties have become, in 2010 alone ASCAP collected $935 millionfor usage of music written by its members.

But in the wake of declining music production costs due to software innovations and the crowdsourcing of talentover the Internet, commercial music libraries are now receiving submissions from music composers who havechosen not to join these performing rights organizations, particularly composers from countries outside of the G-7such as Russia, the Czech Republic and Nigeria. For these musicians, the number of bureaucratic steps throughwhich a royalty payment must pass to finally make its way to them, make the potential for meaningful revenuesfrom PROs extremely unlikely.

I'm not an active member of any PRO in the first place because supposedly with royalty-free music the customerdoesn't need to pay any mechanical royalty fees, or extras, says Manual Ochoa, a musician based in Argentina.But the fact is that in my country it is very difficult to collect foreign performance royalties, added Ochoa.

In many ways Ochoas free-agent status affords him opportunities and advantages which are not available tomembers of PROs.

For example, the upload agreement of iStockPhoto, a leading microstock photo website that began selling music in2007, states:

...if you are a member of ASCAP you may well be entitled to directly license your work but you are not permittedto upload it to iStock.

And PROs define a public performance as "any music played outside a normal circle of friends and family". Thismeans that music created by PRO members can be much costlier to use in restaurants and hotels than music createdby non-PRO members like Ochoa, thus providing Ochoa and other non-PRO musicians the opportunity to offer theirmusic for a lower price.

Gary Eaton, a former Muzak executive says, There were times at Muzak when we worked with rights holders who

had the option to waive PRO fees.this strategy proved helpful in marrying quality content with client objectives

[where cost was an issue].

While most PROs have a clause that allows its members to work directly with TV stations, radio stations andrestaurants (known as direct performance licenses), members are required, at least in BMI's case, to "notify BMIabout the direct performance in writing within 10 days of when you issue the license or within three months of theperformance, whichever comes first. This requirement can create a prohibitive amount of red tape for writers trying


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to market their music through multiple brokers, many of them online, thus creating an advantage for non-PROmusicians.

One way that musicians with PRO memberships have chosen to compete with non-PRO musicians is a practiceknown as re-titling. Re-titling is when a musician allows multiple PRO publishers the claim "exclusive" rights totheir latest song even though the only thing that has changed about the song from one publisher to another is thesong's title. ASCAP and BMI's databases aren't sophisticated enough to see this (yet). Therefore, re-titling hasbecome a commonplace method for musicians to have their songs exploited by as many publishers as possible.Imagine if three different book retailers each exclusively released a new Stephen King book with a unique cover andtitle. Then imagine if you ordered all three books only to realize after reading Chapter 1 that they're all the sameexact book. That is the essence of re-titling.

However, the increased practice of digital fingerprinting, or "watermarking", is likely to render the practice of re-titling impractical. When advanced detection technologies currently being deployed by ASCAP and BMI discover apublic performance for which a royalty can be collected, the software doesn't know under which title that licensewas obtained. To the software, it's all one song. This presents complications for the musician who has registered the

same song 12 different ways with 12 different publishers. For the musician who is already a member of a PRO andworking with multiple production music libraries, re-titling tracks is bound to create confusion as detectiontechnologies evolve and become more pervasive.

To understand re-titling, one must first understand the role played by a PRO publisher. When a PRO pays out aroyalty for any given usage of a song, it actually cuts two checks: one to the registered composer(s) of that song andone of equal value to the registered publisher of that song. By definition, a publisher is an entity whose function is toexploit a piece of music. This model harkens back to the early 20th century when composers composed andpublishers cut deals. The roles were very separate and defined. While those roles may intertwine more often in the21st century, as far ASCAPs and BMI's accounting divisions are concerned.. they do not. They are separate entities.

Musician Gus Caveda has been writing and producing music in all kinds of different genres for over 25 years. Hecurrently lives in Miami, Florida where he produces music for TV and film projects. According to Caveda, "With so

much growing competition in this field of the music industry, its no longer feasible to put all your eggs in onebasket..[but]..Im just not seeing it [the option for writers to keep their own publishing] being offered anymore. Thestandard deal today is 100% of writers share to songwriter, 100% publishers share to library..re-titling hasbecome a practical business solution to a problem that in essence the songwriters themselves have created [bywanting multiple publishers].

Because PROs do not require frees or any professional experience to become a member, there is no particular cacheassociated with membership. To most musicians, the earnings are what matter most.

While there can be benefits of PRO membership, such as the opportunity for additional performance royalties, byavoiding PROs musician can generally offer lower prices and greater flexibility on licensing terms for their music,which can lead to an increase in the volume of their sales.

For the musician currently earning no income from PROs who wishes to gain market share by offering music that is

royalty-free in the truest sense possible, avoiding membership in the PROs may be the most effective way to get

there.

Contact:Chris Cardell or Mike Bielenberg

(678)-900-9228

[email protected]


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About the Author:

Mike Bielenberg has composed and produced music for IBM, Coca Cola, Microsoft, The Cartoon Network as well

as several major commercial music libraries. He is a professional composer/keyboardist in the Atlanta area and co-founder ofwww.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace with over 17,000 tracks online where mediaproducers, video producers, filmmakers, game developers, businesses and other music buyers can license high-quality, affordable royalty-free music from an online community of musicians- [email protected]

About MusicRevolution.com:

MusicRevolution (www.musicrevolution.com) is the Internet's production music marketplace. We provide mediaproducers, video producers, filmmakers, game developers, businesses and other music buyers with great royalty-freeproduction, or stock, music at affordable prices for TV/radio broadcast, film, corporate video, retail & website

background music, legal music for YouTube, on-hold music, and other business music applications. Our productionmusic library has over 17,000 high-quality tracks and new royalty-free music is being added every day.MusicRevolution's royalty-free production music library includes every genre and style of music, including: OnHold, Fun, New Age, Rock, Comedy, Corporate, Drama, Energetic, Orchestral/Classical, Christmas/Holiday,Acoustic Guitar, Hip Hop, Retail, Sentimental, Advertising, Electronica, Country, Jazz, Piano and Vocals.MusicRevolution.com offers four purchase options for customers-- single tracks, CDs, subscriptions and ourinnovative Internet music stream. As an online marketplace, Music Revolution provides professional and aspiringmusicians with the opportunity to license their production music while learning from and collaborating with the bestin the music community.


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musicians redefine royalty-free music

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