The Stage

Royalty system fails digital age

Published Wednesday 28 September 2005 at 10:50 by Alistair Smith

Royalty collection methods need urgent updating to stop artists who write music for digital television being left with little more than a 2% chance of getting their royalties, according to the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters.

Collection body the Performing Right Society currently employs a sampling system to collect royalties for digital TV similar to that used for radio, in which small sections of a year’s broadcasts are analysed and the payments for the whole 12 months calculated accordingly. However, the chance of a TV programme being sampled can be as low as one in 45, leading critics to believe this has created a lottery for lyricists and composers, many of whom are likely to be paid nothing.

Speaking to The Stage, BACS chairman David Ferguson said: “It needs fixing. How it gets fixed is a much more difficult question to answer. At the moment, were royalties not collected by sampling for digital channels, the cost could become more than the amount distributed. As we move into a totally digital universe, the models have got to be different.”

In 2004 the PRS collected £95.1 million in UK broadcasting royalties from television and radio. Of this, £59 million came mostly from BBC and commercial analogue channels, which will be phased out by 2012.

Warned Ferguson: “The PRS are making earnest progress and it is up to [its] directors to make sure they react as quickly as is practical - it has to start adapting because the digital portion of broadcasting is growing. If, in six months’ time, we can’t see that some movement has been made, we will increase the pressure.”

The PRS does not use sampling for terrestrial channels, which are analysed in their entirety. Personal manager Marc Berlin, whose clients include lyricists and composers, believes sampling creates an unfair environment for those working for digital television.

One of his clients, who wrote lyrics for the BBC3 programme Flashmob, had almost no chance of being paid any royalties because the PRS had only analysed four days over the six-month period during which the programme was broadcast.

He added: “I have complained repeatedly over the years about the PRS practice of sampling television programmes. When sampling is applied to radio, it would tend to broadly reflect the extent of use of copyright material - a hit record would likely to be played repeatedly, so whenever the sample was taken it would probably be picked up.

“However, in television, the result of sampling is manifestly inequitable. TV programmes are transmitted once or twice in the primary form for which they were commissioned and the composer or lyricist therefore faces a lottery, with probably very long odds, to decide whether he will be paid.”

The PRS said that it was currently carrying out trials on new technologies that could be used to help it collect royalties. The two principal options being considered are systems that rely on sound recognition software to identify music and digital ‘fingerprinting’, in which digital information is embedded in broadcasts to make them identifiable to a computer programme.

However, neither technology is sufficiently developed and a method combining one of the new technologies with sampling is likely to be employed until a better solution is discovered.

PRS executive director Jo Prowse stressed that all money received is distributed to the organisation’s members.

“We currently sample the output of those services that pay us relatively small amounts of money [digital channels] in order that we can pay back as much of that money as possible to our writer and publisher members,” she said.

“Sampling allows us to distribute all of the royalties collected from that service in a meaningful way and we are increasing sample sizes wherever possible to improve accuracy.”