Monday, July 19, 2021

Cedar Boschan on Rising Pressure to Improve Creators' Royalties

Rolling Stone and Billboard recently interviewed me regarding Sony's "Legacy Artist Royalty Plan."  You can read about it here.



On the heels of Sony's announcement, the United Kingdom's Members of Parliament have found cause for a "'complete reset of streaming' that 'enshrines in law rights to a fair share of the earnings,'" which you can read about here.


Given concerns of inflation in the US, and the rising social pressure to fairly compensate creators, do you think the CRB will be more apt to consider our comments on the proposed mechanical rate freeze?


Are you going to comment on such settlement for the CRB to consider? (Click here for instructions on how to register to comment, although the mobile interface was a bit different for me.)


Friday, May 28, 2021

What Does Pro-Rata Mean? Especially With Reference to Streaming Royalties.

Pro rata is a Latin adverb or adjective meaning a proportionate allocation.

When services calculate streaming royalties to licensors on a pro rata basis, it usually means allocating earnings to each licensor according to its share of a pool of total earnings.

However, licensors of content that attracts the most profitable per-stream users are apt to find such standard pro-rata methodology to be unfair and may favor user-centric royalty calculations instead of those that are pool-based. In a user-centric calculation, a streaming service instead pro-rates earnings from each individual user to the relevant licensors and does not first pool earnings matched to individual users.

Pro rata calculations can be used to determine the proportionate shares of any given whole and it is often used in business finance.