Today, Darragh (Asleep On A Compost Heap), Shane (The Torture Garden) and I met with representatives of Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) to discuss the terms of the proposed Limited Online Exploitation Licence (LOEL) which we were asked to pay last week and kicked off a bit of a fuss this side of the internet. None of us are ultimately opposed to paying a licence but we required clarifications all the same.
IMRO were very keen to listen to our concerns about the proposed licence especially considering two of the blogs in question were strictly non-commercial. A common interest in solving this was reached. They have agreed to address our concerns internally, to explore possible solutions and to clarify the issues raised. Namely:
- to see if there is a possibility to introduce a non-commercial licence which would cover non-commercial blogs and sites (Darragh and Shane for example).
- to see what kind of solutions can be reached in terms of online licensing in future.
- to consult concerned IMRO members on all of the issues in which this licence affects them, as currently, IMRO members assign their copyrights to the organisation to collect royalties but do not have any kind of opt-out or waiver for members with regards to promotional material.
From a blogger’s point of view:
We will be operating as normal until such issues are clarified and we will not be obtaining a licence until this happens. From my point of view as a commercial blog (albeit limited) I have taken the decision to move 99% of my MP3 hosting to Soundcloud for a couple of reasons:
- Bandwidth costs – My hosting company have been in touch and I’ve been massively oversubscribed on bandwidth for the last few months to the point where April’s bill (had they not been sound enough to waive the fee) would have cost me €1650 for the month. A ghastly sum which obviously, is beyond any €300 per year fees for licensing.
- Issues with international collection agencies – Outside of IMRO’s immediate terroritory (Ireland), there exists in every country a similar royalty collection agency which will wake up to this issue in the near future such as PRS (UK), ASCAP (U.S.), SACEM (France), SABAM (Belgium), GEMA (Germany) and JASRAC (Japan) and so on. Each of these agencies (who represent bands in their own countries) will possibly be seeking to dish out licences to music blogs and sites in future. If this was to happen then beyond the simple issue of paying a local licence, you could be asked to pay thousands of euro and no music blog will really be able to afford this.
The alternative then, is a sort of a responsibility shift. Using sites such as Soundcloud, Fairtilizer, MUZU, Youtube and so on to shift the onus on obtaining a licence on those companies. It’s a sucky situation which highlights how utterly ill-fitting the proposed licences in each countries are and how they apply to the world wide web. Until a worldwide licence is available and implemented (which is most likely years off), it appears bloggers have no real choice but to use these services over vulnerable self-hosted files.
A huge big thanks to Simon McGarr of McGarr Solicitors who offered to come along to the meeting and offer legal advice to us bloggers. Simon specialises in IP and internet law and represents Digital Rights Ireland so massive thanks to him for legally looking after our interests.
And finally…
To the bands, artists, composers and songwriters who are members of IMRO, as I stressed before (and Jim has also battered home), the responsibility to change the laws and licences that govern how your music is used online is ultimately up to you. If you are not happy that you need IMRO’s permission to upload tracks and give blogs and sites MP3s for promotional purposes (and technically, you would have to pay this licence too), then this is your issue with your representative body IMRO, who represent you to the wider community. As we proved in the last seven days, it is possible to have your voice heard. IMRO are reasonable people whose ultimate goal is to protect the copyright of your work and have their members’ interests at heart. Talk to them. See what can be done. You might actually get somewhere.
See also:
Darragh’s followup post.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005 . He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Cara Magazine, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, founder of Lumo Club, club promoter, event curator and producer of gigs, listening parties & events in Dublin.
Looks like a good start to a conversation about the licence, well done guys.
Good stuff Nialler. It will be very interesting to see how this develops.
Excellent.
Hey, a soundcloud or youtube link sure as hell wont dissuade me from reading this blog.
Good work Nialler, and the lads too.
All seems pretty reasonable so far. Any ideas as to how getting Soundcloud or similar to make sure it’s legally covered would go about? Do you think they’ll pay the licence themselves or would some sort of ad hoc micro-licence fee from whoever thinks they’ll be using it enough to matter be the way to go?
Also, any clarification on what actually happens to the money?
Soundcloud would have to pay a licence to IMRO ultimately unless they can come to a worldwide agreement but I can’t see IMRO approach the Berlin-based Soundcloud directly. Most likely this will come from the German royalty company GEMA or equivalent. They may already have a German licence, I’m not sure.
I’m afraid I’m as confused as I was before.
They don’t appear to have given an explanation for the basic disagreement between the two (three) sides. Why can’t they operate with the same flexibility they did two weeks ago? The answer appears to be that they don’t want to.
I’m also a little concerned by the lack of transparency about how royalties are distributed. If the Richter Collective pays a $300 fee to play its own songs, will all the money go back to those same artists (minus the admin fee) or are their fees just thrown in a pool with everybody else’s? They may detail it on the website, but I wasn’t able to find anything that explained it. If anybody is going to buy a licence, they should at least be aware of what it is they’re paying for, and artists should be aware of what they’re giving up.
Take an €150 licence for a blog for a year. If I feature, say 150 artists on the blog over a year and there are 1,000 streams per of each song, when you carve that up, after whatever admin fee is taken, then the artists as far as I understand will get a very small slice of that total fee.
So I’d imagine if Richter pay €300 for a year – technically they would get most of this back minus the admin fee.
I haven’t seen any breakdown of the distribution of the licence but IMRO have acknowledged that obviously labels like Richter and artists should not have to pay a licence in the first place so they will be consulting their members about this.
Good job guys, and I agree this a good start and i think we should be able to come up with some solution to this.
To me the solution has to be in how musicians register their tracks with IMRO. Clearly there needs to be a system whereby certain tracks can be seperately registered as promo tracks, in that royalties from online streams or downloads are not charged. This would have the advantage that it would be entirely up to the musician to decide how royalties are collected for their music.
Secondly I think in this day and age every musician should be capable of gettting their music up on soundcloud or a similar site. In this case it would be entirely up to the musician themselves as to how long they keep their music available to stream, if it can be downloaded, etc. Again, this would allow bloggers to simply link to the track, rather than hosting it themselves. In many respects, this just seems to make the most sense I think.
Finally, I think there is no way this can applied retroactively. It is entirely unreasonable to ask bloggers for royalties for tracks that were volunteered for free by the musicians themselves. Clearly there was a misunderstanding as to what this meant for royalty payments, but we need constructive, forward looking solutions here.
I’ll be writing to IMRO saying the above.
Nice one Nialler,
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I’m glad to see you’re more resolved on the situation, and that the dialogue has begun to iron out the different issues. The move to Soundcloud is an obvious, and probable move for most of us bloggers. Good luck!
Good to hear a resolution is close. Nice to hear IMRO were willing to converse as well. Well done fellas.
What about the situation with the Richter guys, that they have to get a license to have their own bands tunes on their website. Any word on that?
That is up to IMRO and its members to decide how to proceed.
Ditto to above comments. Glad to see the IMRO to at least be open to listening and particularly with regard to non commercial blogs introducing some sort of non commercial licence would be good if reasonably priced (or free !)
The Soundcloud solution has to be the way forward, and the other good thing here is that record companies / pr companies could upload the tracks for streaming or download on their own Soundcloud accounts meaning that they incur the cost of owning a Soundcloud account, not the blogger, and have control as to when and if they remove tracks that are embedded on the blog, by simply deleting the song from Soundcloud.
Besides I think Soundcloud is a really neat looking, functional site (I’ve just started using it myself for my blog) and think that it could be the way to go for many bloggers.
I’m a little confused as to what the difference is between you hosting the audio and them hosting the audio, when you are still going to be the one providing that music to the public. Isn’t IMRO’s issue that you are profiting (in whatever capacity) from their artist’s work and that they want to get paid so that those bands are compensated. So should the hosting matter? Is your hosting even based in Ireland? Was the issue of off-site hosting raised with them?
The distinction was made between the two yesterday. It’s not that you are profiting per se but that you are making work available but with that a licence has to take into account what can be paid.
If your website is made available in Ireland you are liable to pay a licence. Additionally if you host the files yourself on your server then you are liable to pay.
It’s more a case of shifting responsibility for the hosting to a place which where the responsibility is ultimately with that host (in this case Soundcloud). We argued that there was no difference ultimately to Soundcloud’s servers and our servers currently. The fact that the song is streaming from Soundcloud rather than Nialler9.com seems to be the ultimate distinction.
Well done guys, glad it all was taken on board anyway. Looking forward to see what happens next.
Fantastically written post as always Niall.
Well done Nialler & Company, It seems a good bit clearer now and as someone said above using soundcloud won’t stop me reading your blog.
Well I must say that I am happy to see that despite some of the “righteous talk” on the other thread that was doing bloggers no favours that Nialler9 put three very succint points across. It would be my view that if Imro could deal with the first point then points 2 and 3 are largely irrelevant. Hobby bloggers apply for a “waiver” which means they recognaise that they recognaise that they are using copyrighted works, gives them limited use of material for either a nomimal fee, no fee or an agreed fee. I say limited as there will always be some terms and conditions of some sort imposed.
If this is the case then the “concerned musicians” won’t need to be consulted and can leave their agreements in place. This would be the wisest option for them as opt outs and waivers are a road that they will not want to go down.
In regard to international bodies. Would the current system not suffice? IMRO issue a global licence to bloggers and collect the money. So you pay the royalty body where your site is based i.e Nialler9 pays IMRO, american sites pay ASCAP etc.
@dave REally how IMRO divvy up the royalties that they receive is not the concern of bloggers, radio, tv stations or anybody else who uses the material of the artists they represent. Ultimately, this money is income for the artists so they will insist on a lean collection agency in terms of costs. Why have things changed from two weeks ago? Two weeks ago there wasn’t a collection method in place. It’s like pirate radio, there was no means of collecting royalties.
@enda if artists register tracks for promo use and waive royalties then it will need to apply to all media including radio and tv which generate considerable royalties for copyright holders. This would be a retrograde step for any artist. Plus you have the problem, is a promo track always a promo track? What happens when it becomes a commercial release? Does it’s status change and if so, does it need to be removed or a royalty paid? The easiest thing is that commercial publications pay and hobby blogs avail of some sort of limited licence at a low or zero fee.
Brian, there are no way that point 2 is irrelevant for commercial blogs which this blog falls under. The biggest problem as I outlined is the current system absolutely does not suffice. It’s not enforced in any capacity at the moment but IMRO’s attempt here is the start.
IMRO can only currently a licence for the territory of Ireland only. While they collect for international artists, ultimately, any collection agency in the world can look for the same in their territory (say Canada) from me for making my site available there. Obviously, if this was enforced then there would be no way that any blogger can seriously pay these licences as we don’t make that much money despite what people like Hot Press may think.
What harm in questioning how the licence is divvied up? It’s of interest to artists, licence holders, labels, media etc. If i was to pay this licence I’d certainly like to know how it works. Look at the interest in how Spotify manages its streaming royalties – people are genuinely interested in how it all works.
The ultimate point that you keep avoiding is that this licence technically requires bands and labels to pay it too. This is one of the main problems of the licence. This is clearly a different situation to radio. Bands don’t start radio stations but they can start a website so why should they pay to post their own songs online?
The distinction between “commercial” & non-commercial blogs is a complete red herring. If an Irish band or label approaches us (thumped.com) and *asks us* for an mp3 to be featured on the site then why should we be expected to pay a licensing fee for the privilege of advertising / publicising their work? Not going to happen.
This isn’t commercial (pirate or otherwise) radio – we’re not compiling playlists of radio friendly music so we can ‘exploit’ someone’s creative endeavours to fill space between commercial breaks, and it’s disingenuous to try to make that comparison. We’re giving bands a platform to reach tens of thousands of potential listeners, and we’re doing it for free (or more accurately we’re bearing the cost, if you factor in bandwidth charges.)
The beauty of the internet is just how easy it is to measure and quantify things. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere: “The pages containing the three most recently hosted mp3s (all of which are hosted at the bands’ request) accounted for a total of 0.189% of all pageviews for the first four months of the year. By extension, less than one fifth of one percent of revenue generated by the site [over those four months] is attributable to those three mp3s.” And as I’ve also said elsewhere, the artists in question are more than welcome to 100% of that 0.189% of four month’s revenue. Or, if they prefer, we could pull all ads from mp3 pages. Same result for us in the end, really.
Certainly, artists need a mechanism by which they can control how their material is used, but what’s needed is a waiver with a clear set of usage terms for *sites*, not individual tracks. That may not be how it’s done in radio & tv, but so what? Welcome to the 21st century.
Now, just so we’re clear, I’m only talking about sites / blogs that use tracks supplied by the artists or their label specifically for promotional purposes. If someone’s putting up unapproved stuff then that’s it’s a different matter entirely.
And why is everyone in such a rush to outsource their mp3 hosting to Soundcloud and the like? Doesn’t anyone remember what happened when mp3.com packed it in?
Pete, there argument is that you are making copyrighted work available and it matters little what your situation is. I agree with you that it can be a dumb concept depending on the case (in yours for example)
Pete, I happen to like Soundcloud and it takes care of my immediate bandwidth issues outlined above.
@Brian
“Really how IMRO divvy up the royalties that they receive is not the concern of bloggers, radio, tv stations or anybody else who uses the material of the artists they represent.”
Why wouldn’t it be my concern? I’m paying for a service and I expect the service to be carried out. If I don’t think my licence fee is going to benefit the artists whose music I use, I’ll just remove the music from my site. It’s a function of being a consumer.
“Why have things changed from two weeks ago? Two weeks ago there wasn’t a collection method in place. It’s like pirate radio, there was no means of collecting royalties.”
Of course there was a method of collecting royalties – State.ie has been paying the licence fee for two years. What seems to have changed is that IMRO has identified that there is money to be made in blogging and they want their slice.
@Niall
“So I’d imagine if Richter pay €300 for a year – technically they would get most of this back minus the admin fee.”
Ah, OK, that’s what I wasn’t sure of. I was afraid that it would all go into a massive kitty and that would all be divied out by total airplay. Sounds silly, but I haven’t been able to find a proper explanation.
“IMRO can only currently a licence for the territory of Ireland only. While they collect for international artists, ultimately, any collection agency in the world can look for the same in their territory (say Canada) from me for making my site available there. Obviously, if this was enforced then there would be no way that any blogger can seriously pay these licences as we don’t make that much money despite what people like Hot Press may think.”
I think Brian is right here. The royalties are collected from the point of broadcast (the blog) rather than the point of reception (the listener) – that’s the purpose of all the treaties these organisations have with one another. Once you submit your list to IRMA at the end of the month, every play is accounted for in one place, so there’d be no reason for an overseas agency to seek to collect for something they’re already paying IMRO to do.
I specifically asked about the possibility of international licences coming in from PRS and ASCAP as it’s my biggest concern. If I pay this IMRO licence then it would leave me open to pay many licences.
IMRO couldn’t offer me reassurances that this would not happen. By paying this licence you are only covered for what you make available in Ireland. My site is still available in the US so ASCAP could come looking for those US-based royalty plays.
That’s mad. I sincerely believe they’re very confused.
In fact, it’s extremely odd that they’re attempting to licence something but can’t even tell you if they have the exclusive competence to do so. It’s bizarre.
Thanks for all the hard work from you and the lads on this matter. It’s really appreciated. I am a bit confused about the Soundcloud thing though. Apart from looking really ugly as a mp3 player/distributer surely there is a fee involved in using the service – how does that compare to the licence fee? In relation to bandwidth wouldn’t it make sense to prune the stock of mp3s available on Nialler from time to time? It was for this very reason (and other obvious concerns) that songs are only available on mp3hugger for 6 days. As its strickly applied we’ve never had a bandwidth issue.
IMROgate is a sorry mess, if only the dialogue could have taken place first. Hopefully when similiar cases occur outside Ireland lessons will have been learned. The only thing that seems to have suffered is the promotion of rarely heard talent.
I do keep my MP3s pruned. Maybe not enough though.
Surely IMRO should be paying you guys. You’re doing more to break and support Irish music than they’ve ever done, your efforts all go towards supporting the scene, ensuring it keeps their coffers topped up.
I’m all for fair return for the musicians involved, a value should always be put on original creativity, but taxing the passionate people pouring their efforts into blogs, etc. seems backward from any viewpoint.
It’ll just lead to lots of bloggers stopping, which can’t be good for the scene IMRO says it supports.
Hear, hear!
If the bloggers are the ones who are intorducing the world to new and exciting Irish music, why not put them to work?
so imro says we’ll look into, don’t call us we’ll summons you
is there not some sort of industry/record label streaming site they could set up where bands could upload their songs and let certain sites exclusively embed their songs?
Well done guys. Glad you stood up to this. Thank you.
Instead of waiting for IMRO to get back to you, is it not time for the people which this move concerns to get together and lobby for an alternative. I think one of the most interesting initiatives that happened in recent years was the Give Us The Night collective that came out of promoters and venue owners having their backs against the wall when it came to later pub opening hours.
It would have been great to see that push on through, once the risk had waned, to look for later closing in line with the UK or Europe but as regards this IMRO move, surely there is enough interest from all parties (bands, bloggers, journalists, promoters, venue owners, etc.) to go back to IMRO and have them reassess their position for this but ultimately its entire reason for being.
@ nialler9 18
In regard to point 2, yes I do accept that there is more discussion required here but I think the principle that a blog should be levied only in the country that it is domiciled in. In other words, if you are based in Ireland you pay IMRO for a global licence. Despite the Internet being global, traffic to most sites tends to be local because of relevance. Could geo-restricting MP3s be a solution? You can still read the blog just not access the copyright material.
Really how the bands divvy up their money is no business of yours or mine. It might be of interest – and I believe from somebody who has seen the “map” (but not allowed touch it!!) that it’s an incredibly complex system – particularly in reciprocal arrangements with foreign royalty bodies. How they charge is their business the same as any other private company. Granted that there’s not much competition in this sector.
As for Hot Press, they know exactly how little or how much money is made from online publications as they have one themselves and the same rules would apply to their own online activities.
I really think the issue of bands and/or record labels having to pay royalties for the use of their own music on their own site is not an important one. It’s up to IMRO members to sort that one out for themselves. There are many straightforward solutions to this – one could be that they get a waiver for two sites, their own and that of their label. They;re the music makers and it is a different issue.
@ pete 19 It’s not a red herring as the precedent is already set. With the notable exception of American radio, all broadcast media pay the artist for the priviledge of promoting their work. Whatever you may think about the radio medium it still promotes more new music to people than any other medium. Radio also uses material that is specifically for promotional purposes. Just because artists supplied the material and never discussed royalty payments does not mean that you can assume exemption (or the fact that they haven’t come looking for it up to now).
I have a serious difficulty on how you perceive the role of blogs. You give the impression that you are some sort of promotional pipe for squirting out promo MP3’s on behalf of bands or artist. Is that how your readers see it? What’s their motivation for visiting your blog or any blog? I would have thought that They go their to discover and be entertained by the content on the blog just as they tune in radio stations. BBC Radio has no commercials and is funded by the listener through a licene to inform, educate and entertain. Yet a few years ago an artist would earn Stg£18 per minute for airplay on BBC radio 1 (don’t know what it is now). So why should BBC radio pay royalties? The answer is simple. Artists expect to be paid if the work is played, performed or reproduced and whether that occurs via short wave radio or over the Internet makes no difference.
Plus if the pages that host MP3s drive so little traffic, is this a battle worth having wit IMRO in the first place? It would seem that readers are more interested in the content that you create.
@thesmallprint as stated ad nauseum, there’s a lot of media that support up and coming artists but those artists expect to get paid for the use of their work on all media.
The interesting thing is that although some bands see the usefullness of blogs is that IMRO is made up of many members including some big fish. I presume that if a waiver for a section of the media is being made that these members will have to see if it has a knock on affect on other media sectors. I presume that any changes will have to be agreed internally with IMRO members?
Of course the big hole in the IMRO approach that by allowing embeds there is nothing to stop anybody embedding copyright materialon a page, adding some of their own content and selling advertising around it…which amounts to use of the copyright work to make money.
Does this story sound familiar?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8108379.stm
I know I come here to discover new music, comment, listen and give MP3s to help promote gigs. I come for the editorial and dialogue, and the comments.
I don’t listen to radio nor compare it to an internet medium because they are based on commercial enterprise. The songs the play, the gigs they promote and the discussion on air are are influenced directly and indirectly from the revenue from advertisers they require to operate.
What’s the ratio of music content vs total output of radio station in terms of editorial content?
It’s simply comparing watermelons to raisins.
Blogs are the last bastion of hope for new music given that the more recent flavours of the month on Ireland’s radio waves have veered towards the commercial and pedestrian routes, seemingly in search of new listeners, rather than new music.
The move by IMRO to recategorise blogs in line with television and radio stations is a move to safeguard commercial enterprise, not one to safeguard musician’s interests or rights.
Brian, you said that “artists expect to be paid” for having their music shared on our sites. That’s generally not the case – just ask any of the thousands of legit sites out there, or even better, the bands and pr people we deal with on daily basis, who push songs on us without expecting anything.
That’s a pretty important distinction, and one that we brought up with IMRO. They were very reasonable about it.
@Brian
“I have a serious difficulty on how you perceive the role of blogs. You give the impression that you are some sort of promotional pipe for squirting out promo MP3’s on behalf of bands or artist. Is that how your readers see it?”
Did Phantom pay IMRO dues before it was granted its BCI licence?
@brian daly re: bbc story
The gist of that story is a bit misleading in that the reader is left with the impression that US radio stations pay no money at all. The money paid to ASCAP, for example, via fees collected for Public Performance goes to the copyright holder – generally the publisher or songwriter, who is not necessarily the performer. That is where this topic gets so confusing. Artists have historically not been the copyright holders, strange as that seems today. It wasn’t until the early 60s when the singer/songwriter concept took hold and you had artists like Bob Dylan who not only performed the song but also wrote the lyrics and the music. Prior to that, the publishers & record labels controlled everything and the singers & musicians were hired and compensated as ‘work for hire’.
Here are a couple of links that are a tad old, but may shed some light on this very confusing subject – granted this information is based on US Copyright law, but it is more than likely the concepts apply elsewhere:
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/music-royalties1.htm
http://www.betanews.com/article/House-bill-would-strike-radios-exemption-from-performance-royalties/1233786486
http://www.ascap.com/licensing/termsdefined.html
Fair play to you Niall and the other two guys, Darragh and Shane! This is a massive moment in Irish music history and I’m delighted in the way that ye are handling it.
And your right in saying a huge part of it is up to the IMRO members themselves to sort it out as well.
I remember when this blog was in the early days and you were saying how quickly the Irish music scene had changed from being pretty banal to suddenly very promising and exciteing – looks like were going back to the bad aul days!
Keep it up though 🙂
Just wondering if there’s been any update from IMRO on this subject – have they come back to you with any new proposals?
I’m doing a little promotions work with a band at the moment, and we’re just starting to research what’s been going on with IMRO/bands/blogs lately.
We’re not IMRO members, and not really sure if there are any benefits to joining at the moment. We’ll keep looking into it…
Thanks for the informative blog posts!
Eoin, the latest is that I’ve since met IMRO reps again. The meeting was a more informal one to work out what exactly can be done to benefit the musicians who get blog coverage by facilitating bloggers and not taxing them out of their webspace.
IMRO’s current licence expires at the end of the year. They will come up with a new proposal by that stage to address out concerns. You should definitely join IMRO for your own band’s sake but like this issue highlights be aware that you are assigning your copyright to IMRO and that they have the final say with what exactly you do with it.