Ice Ice Baby

17 Aug 2017

How the role of ICE supports the payment of copyright royalties
Within our sister company, David Weise and Associates UK (DWA), we are responsible for the royalty accounting for our growing client base of artists, bands, song writers and producers. Royalties are a very complex area and the whole subject needs a blog of its own, which will no doubt turn into a dissertation (watch this space)! We are often asked about how an individual gets paid from the moment a song is streamed, played on the radio, or performed in a public place. In this blog, I want to focus on the basics of how our digital age has forced performing rights organisations (PROs) to find solutions that are equally as good in terms of technology and which help with the collection of royalties when a song is streamed. Some other terms that will assist as you read through this blog are as follows: • DSP – this means digital service provider, such as the likes of Spotify and Apple Music • ICE - International Copyright Enterprise • PRS – the British Performing Rights Society In practice, there are many people and organisations who have the right to receive royalties from the streaming of a song, but to keep things simple, we need to think of royalties as being split two ways; that is between the owner of the ‘Copyright’ and the owner of the ‘Master’ (the master recording of the song). The Copyright owner is the person or company (usually a Publisher) that owns the rights to the written work (i.e. musical composition and lyrics). The Master owner is the person who has performed on, and recorded the track, or in the case of major artists, the Record Label which has recorded the song. To understand the workings of the DSPs, ICE and PRS, we are focussing on the Copyright side of life. If you are reading this blog then you are no doubt already aware of the amazing things that the leading DSPs have done to change how we consume our favourite music. Essentially, we are able to stream our music within seconds, and if we choose to we can subscribe to our DSP of choice and download the music just as easily. This is one thing the late Steve Jobs told us would never happen, as in his own words ‘who will ever want to rent their music?’. Well it turns out an awful lot of us. So the DSPs revolutionised our music consumption habits, which meant that every single PRO across the planet had to find ways to collect music usage data to ensure its members were being paid their fair share of copyright royalties. Along comes ICE…. On October 13th in 2006, CEOs of the Swedish collecting society STIM and PRS, sat down and discussed the future of the collecting societies. Faced with a number of difficult challenges due to technological advancement, the outcome of these discussions ended in the creation of ICE – a jointly owned back office for professional copyright services. It allows the music industry to explore its extensive works and production database, and facilitates reporting, matching and distribution for all rights, including mechanical, online and performing rights. ICE is therefore used by a number of PROs to help them report effectively and accurately to its members. The food chain therefore looks something like this: Music Consumer (that’s you and me) > DSP > PRO > Member (Copyright Owner) The process and timeline is relatively short, although in our experience Members would still like to be paid out much quicker!

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