In the first episode of this series "rights and royalties" we understood that triangulation is Licenses that pay royalties to those who have the rights. We also learned that a song or work magically obtains rights without ever being recorded or registered. You lift the pen from the paper and it is already protected, the problem is that if you do not register it or are not a member of a collection society, no one knows that it is yours to pay you royalties. So let's forget the magical rights and go straight to study to do a good management.
In this episode we are going to focus on the types of rights, royalties and licenses so that you are clear about all those that can favor you and how to manage them.
Let us begin!
Episode # 13
Moral, patrimonial copyright
The moral right belongs to the author of the song, it is non-negotiable, non-transferable and never expires. A song that Mozart composed is Mozart's forever. What if it expires is the right to exploit it commercially, that is, the economic right. These economic rights can be assigned, sold, shared with a publisher and be called editorial rights, etc. On the other hand, these exploitation rights expire and the time depends on each country, it can be 50, 75 or even 100 years after the death of the author. When this time passes, the work becomes public domain.
With this said, if you have the copyright of a work then you have the right to: reproduce it, distribute it, transform it into versions, translations, etc. But there are also limitations. The first is the expiration time mentioned, another is that, if your work has already been disclosed and is used for academic purposes, you cannot prevent it. Be careful, if you are going to sell a book that contains the score of a song, that is if you can prevent it. But if, on the other hand, in a music class, your work is cited to teach music, you can't. We continue!
This has nothing to do with recording a song. When you record it, the following come:
Related rights
Artists, performers, performers and producers of phonograms (that is, the recorded version) have it on a musical work protected by Copyright.
In my opinion, to understand the whole thing in an orderly way for practical purposes, there is no more laps to give about the rights and we have already moved on to the licenses that pay royalties to those who have the rights.
Royalties and Licenses
All very nice, but now we want to charge. Let's review the types of royalties:
Mechanical royalties:
This royalty is designed for the author of the song. For example, playing a disc drive or selling a song through an iTunes download or playing on Spotify even when streaming live on Twitch generates mechanical royalties for the songwriter. On reproductions the royalty percentage rate is much less than a sale, but let's say it is offset by volume. On Spotify, for example, if a song generates $ 10 in reproductions, that generated $ 1.5 in mechanical royalties for the composer, even if it is a version of another artist. And if you are the artist, in practice you are paying yourself.
Now then if you want to do a YouTube broadcast using live third party music, you need a mechanical license. In the United States, the most famous entity for obtaining all kinds of licenses is the Harry Fox Agency (Harryfox.com).
Be careful here. If you are affiliated with a copyright collecting society, they do not collect your mechanical royalties. If you want to affiliate with a mechanical royalty collector, they collect public performance royalties, both traditional and digital, but let's get to that. One of the most famous collectors of mechanical royalties is The Mechanical Licensing Collective. www.themlc.com
You can also join Cd baby Pro, among others that give you the same service. But be careful with this because it is not something that comes by default. You must still request it in tunecore. It is important to say that MLC and Harry Fox agency work together to have the catalogs correctly and while some give the licenses, the other affiliate, collect and pay the royalties.
Public performance royalties:
It is what generates the musical composition in a commercial public context. We have two types:
1. The traditional ones, which are the compositions playing in broadcasts made by traditional radios, internet radios, open or cable television, concerts, etc. For example, if you have a radio, you can pay a public performance license to the PRO (Preforming Rights Organization) also known as the Copyright Collection Society such as BMI or ASCAP to use their entire catalog. For example, a radio station in the United States has to pay several Societies. To have the famous licensing blanket pay ASCAP and BMI because if you only pay for one, the song catalog is limited. At the end of the month, the radio transmits the report of the songs to the collectors so that they pay the corresponding composers.
2. The digital ones that are generated on platforms like Spotify in a public context as well. Nowadays the radio no longer has a record, but could use Spotify. For this reason, the mechanical royalty in the digital context is not the same as that of public execution in the digital context.
So the composer who has the rights to at least one song wants to fully collect the mechanical and public performance royalties through the aforementioned mechanisms.
In the next episode we will end all this theoretical context by emphasizing the licenses and the combined uses of the digital environment.