Rights

Recent news of Spotify’s reported plan to introduce two-tier licensing represents a significant departure from the incremental shifts we have seen thus far. With developments like Deezer’s new streaming royalty model with Universal Music Group, to X’s premium subscription, the tension between platforms hosting content from an ever-growing pool of creators, and creator remuneration for that content, is at a breaking point.

Source: Cutting loose the long tail in a rising culture of creative consumption

One of the questions around the future of collections is artificial intelligence, the industry’s favorite savior or bogeyman, depending on the day, and the CISAC report devotes most of two pages to it, in the form of forewords by Oron and CISAC President Björn Ulvaeus. “There is no question that the way we address it now will have a huge bearing on collections in the future,” writes Oron, who calls the technology an “existential issue” that presents both “threats” and “amazing opportunities.”

Source: What Drove the Record-Breaking Revenue for Rights in 2022

Within the report, the Paris-headquartered organization provides what it calls a “comprehensive” overview of data and analysis of global royalty collections across all repertoires. Music collections were the largest segment, with publisher and songwriter royalties collected by their societies globally growing by a record 28% YoY in 2022 to reach €10.8 billion.

Source: Global songwriter royalty collections hit $11.35bn in 2022 – with Latin America revenues up 64.9% YoY

As AI-generated porn becomes more advanced, adult film performers—like their mainstream peers—are calling for more protections against the unauthorized use of their likenesses and fair compensation for their content. For legendary adult performer Tanya Tate, the rise of artificial intelligence is eerily familiar. “It feels to me the way it did when there was a rise in pirated content,” she said.

Source: Porn Actors Say They Need Help Fighting AI Exploitation, Too – Decrypt

UK-based royalty collection and distribution pillar PRS for Music announces a record quarterly royalty distribution of $288.7 million (£239 million), a 13% increase compared to last October. The largest single royalty payment in PRS for Music’s 109-year history, over 4,000 members received their first royalty payments this month.

Source: PRS for Music Scores the ‘Largest Single Royalty Payment in Its History’

This morning Deezer has announced a partnership with French collecting society Sacem to “explore the artist-centric monetization model for publishing rights in music streaming.” That means “new ways of rewarding the value songwriters and publishers create” that “aims to ensure fairer compensation for publishing rights owners.”

Source: Deezer and Sacem to explore ‘artist-centric’ publishing payouts – Music Ally

With the dust still far from settled on the UMG / Deezer streaming royalty proposal, something even bigger is coming: Spotify is turning the concept into reality in Q1 2024. Streaming democratized access to the means of distribution, enabling an unprecedented growth in artists and releases. But the brake is now being firmly applied. Streams may have all been created equal, but now some streams are becoming more equal than others.

Source: Two-tier licensing is about to become a reality

As short-form video content platform TikTok continues to battle criticism from multiple fronts, the company revealed its latest data on copyright and trademark content removal requests in 2022, which have more than tripled from the previous year. In fact, the numbers from July to December 2022 far outshine and nearly double those from the first half of that year.

Source: TikTok Copyright Takedowns More Than Tripled in 2022