The MCPS-PRS Alliance recently announced two new partnerships that will trigger the biggest shift in music licensing since the emergence of the collecting society network at the turn of the 20th Century. The initiatives replace the ‘old’ model of licensing music on a territorial basis with a new model that licenses music on a pan-European basis for online.
The first partnership is with EMI Music Publishing. The Alliance will work with German society GEMA, to create a one-stop shop for the licensing of EMI’s Anglo-American song rights for online and mobile on a pan-European basis. This is a significant step towards true pan-European licensing. EMI’s significant Anglo-American repertoire will be available to license across Europe in one licensing agreement instead of previously needing more than 25.
The second partnership is with Spanish society, SGAE. The Alliance will work with SGAE to explore how to develop their existing online licensing system - known as eLOS - into a pan-European licensing tool for the English speaking and Latin repertoires. Together these account for almost 80% of the world’s repertoire and the attraction of bringing the two together to enable it to be licensed on a pan-European basis is obvious.
These are likely to be the first of many announcements as other publishers look to make similar arrangements to the one EMI has made and as other collecting societies form allegiances in an attempt to harvest the potentially lucrative digital world on behalf of their members. Such deals will mean easier licensing of works for online use with only one administrative deduction.
These Alliance initiatives follow and are supported fully by the European Commission’s October 2005 Recommendation for online licensing (M18).
Steve Porter is MD of the MCPS-PRS Alliance