Protecting music
We're committed to protecting the value of music and ensuring our members' rights are represented. That's why we're fighting music piracy and tackling the challenges that digital technology has brought to the industry.
Digital licensing
Digital technology has had a significant impact on our industry, changing the way we listen to, and license, music.
Our organisation has always been at the forefront of this change; we were the first collecting society to license YouTube back in 2005 and, more recently, the first to license SoundCloud in 2016.
Digital platforms such as these give consumers the ability to listen to music anywhere in the world, so it’s important we administer multi-territory agreements with digital service providers to simplify the international licensing of our members’ rights.
This approach stems from the European Commission’s recommendation for the competitive, EU-wide licensing of online services – also known as Option 3 licensing.
As music consumption grows, the music industry is experiencing significant data challenges. It’s vitally important that we are able to manage large data volumes, and also that this data is accurate, so that we can remunerate our members fairly.
In 2016, we launched ICE Services, our joint venture with Swedish collecting society STIM and German collecting society GEMA. This industry-leading digital licensing and processing centre offers state-of-the-art solutions to meet such demands.
Data initiatives
Data drives our distributions to members, so proving the accuracy of that data is one of our key priorities.
Over recent years, there has been an explosion in the volume of data we’re receiving from digital music users around the world. In 2016 alone, we processed over four trillion uses of music, an increase of 80 percent on the previous year.
Our challenge is to match this data to our members’ musical works, so we’re launching many new initiatives to tackle this issue.
Fighting music piracy
We actively protect copyright with our anti-piracy unit and its successful Membership Anti-Piracy System (MAPS), which has been empowering our members and fighting music piracy for more than a year.
