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22 Music Week 28.06.13 REPORT NEIGHBOURING RIGHTS


their work was played. Thus, once commercially released, artists that


performed on a record played in public were entitled to remuneration across the EU and elsewhere. But how much remuneration they were owed has always been the sticking point… Canadian-based Premier Muzik International,


which partners with All Right Music in France for a unified global front, began 28 years ago as a group of producers. Over time it established a label, a publishing house and an administration arm drawing in royalties for artists and composers. Eventually, it began collecting Neighbouring Rights royalties for performers. According to president Gino Olivieri, Neighbouring Rights now accounts for 85% of the company’s core business, compared to 15% from the publishing side. “It’s an important part of income nowadays,”


Olivieri explains. “In fact I believe most European labels thrive on this as their number one primary source of income. [Record] sales used to be the primary source of income, now Neighbouring Rights are. Publishing was high but it’s not there anymore. “It’s hard to say but it’s tens of thousands of


dollars,” says Olivieri as an indicator of just how much performers and master owners can stand to make from Neighbouring Rights per year. “If you have a Top 10 [record], you’re talking probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if you have a No.1 it can be in the millions. It all depends.”


“One would think you sign up and the money flows in but that’s not the reality. Linking repertoire is key” CHRISTOPHE PIOT, ALL RIGHT MUSIC


Discussing the worldwide increase in


Neighbouring Rights income in 2012, PPL boss Peter Leathem isn’t shy about emphasising just how much of it has come via his UK-based collecting society - flexing its royalty collection muscle outside of its home territory. “In 2012 we collected £36.6 million [ex-UK] which was a growth of 13% year-on-year,” he reveals. “We started collections, loosely around 2002 and they really took off when we had the merger of PAMRA and AURA - two former performance societies - as we started to provide services for the performers, not just the record companies. “We’ve collected £160 million in total since


2002. Putting that back into the music industry is actually quite a contribution to its ability to invest and carry on growing. It’s a sizable sum of money.” Leathem is keen to emphasise the future potential of the revenue stream. He expects it to continue growing in years to come: “It does become quite an important part of how companies and performers are earning their money.” Markus Bos, CEO of Dutch collection society Sena, agrees about the growing importance of


Neighbouring Rights saying that it is contributing significantly to various labels’ bottom line, while Kobalt Neighbouring Rights chief Hans van Berkel believes that the potential income from Neighbouring Rights stands to outweigh that of publishing. “It’s the backbone for performers and labels today,” he explains. “The labels used to think that Neighbouring Rights was peanuts, especially compared to publishing. “They got real money from mechanical rights


and weren’t interested in Neighbouring Rights – but they underestimated the collections they had already missed and the potential of collections.” Van Berkel suggests there’s a psychological element to dealing with the performer of a track rather than the author because, in the case of featured artists at least, they are the famous face of a particular song. “In many countries, when they started collecting


Neighbouring Rights, they were around 10% or 20% of the value of the publishing rights,” he explains. “But in the end you are collecting more than the publishing rights because the collecting societies have more opportunity to negotiate better tariffs since these are the faces of the music and they’re better known.” Sena’s Bos mentions recent trends, which could illustrate just that point - as a genre’s popularity increases, so does the value in some of its top artists. Of course, that means more Neighbouring Rights revenue through increased airplay, but the


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