Re: Royalties for Mechanical Music
By Douglas K. Rhodes
The royalty collection agency in Canada, equivalent to the Harry Fox Agency in the US, is Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency Ltd. (CMRRA). The royalty they charge for mechanical licensing is "6.6 cents [CDN] per song per copy sold or otherwise distributed, where the playing time is five minutes or less."
If we include 18 songs on the CD that our vintage music orchestra is recording, that's roughly $1.19 [CDN] per CD. (All the tunes were written between 1922 and 1931.) Our total manufacturing and production cost, not including royalties, is projected to be $4.30 [CDN] per unit. If we pay the royalty in advance on all units pressed, as the CMRRA is requesting, our up-front costs increase by over 27%. This is a big blow to a slim budget.
Admittedly, we have been advised by a number of people in the industry (though not by CMRRA) to simply ignore the royalty liabilty until sales exceed 5000 units or so. I realize that this is what a lot of low-budget producers do. I am uncomfortable having to sneak around the law, however, while engaging in what I consider a perfectly legitimate business activity.
CMRRA has given no hint that they would support this tactic. Indeed, they informed me that they expect full payment on units as they are pressed, regardless of sales. They have also made no mention whatsoever of the 5000 unit "demo" limit that S. K. Goodman referred to.
Less disturbing is the music industry-negotiated royalty that owners of public performance venues pay. I believe around 2% of their entertainment budgets get paid to CMRRA. This seems fairly legitimate, as most music played in pubs and theatres is a lot less than fifty years old. The writers of those works deserve compensation (if, in fact, the money gets to the actual writers).
I might have an easier time with all of this if I were not aware of other strong-arm tactics that the royalty agencies have engaged in. Our local music conservatory, for instance, pays a flat yearly fee (I think it's about $1500.00) to the CMRRA for royalties payable on presumed use of original and photo-copied sheet music.
I don't have too much trouble with that, except that my daughter was informed, as she walked into her 'cello master class, that she would be disqualified from her quarterly assessment for using photo-copied sheet music -- no exceptions. Guess where that policy came from! I argued that the photo-copy in question was of a Peters (Leipzig) Edition printed in 1880 of a Mozart piece written in 1782. "I'm sorry, Mr. Rhodes, the rules are the rules..."
Perhaps this is not quite the policy implementation that CMRRA was after, but I wouldn't bet on it.
According to CMRRA:
"Under Canadian law, a musical work is copyrighted if its author is
still living, or if the author died less than 50 years ago...."
The copyright holder is also enabled, under US law, to collect royalties on any published composition that is presently 75 years old or less. This is rather complicated, isn't it? There might be some comfort in all this if we knew that payment was actually going to the original writers or their heirs. But how many composers and their heirs still actually hold the copyright on many of those older tunes? And how does one find out?
The history of the music industry is rife with stories of writers and performers who signed away their rights for a few bucks, or who signed contracts which effectively ceded all royalty rights to the record company or publisher after seven years. Again, with respect to older works, I think the primary beneficiaries of these laws are corporate shareholders, and not necessarily composers and musicians.
Doug Rhodes |
(Message sent Wed 8 Jan 1997, 00:40:32 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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