INDIE
INSIDER
By Michael Raine
HOW DO YOU GET PAID
for Livestreamed Concerts?
SOCAN Interim CEO Jennifer Brown on rights & royalties for online concerts
Since COVID-19 completely
shut down the live music
industry a few months ago,
musicians have been turning
to multiple livestreaming
platforms to engage with
fans, and hopefully also make
a little money. But this huge and sudden
shift towards livestreamed performances
caught the music rights collectives — and
the platforms themselves — off guard.
So, we caught up with SOCAN’s Jennifer
Brown, the former VP of licensing and current
interim CEO, to discuss the quicklyevolving
world of rights and royalties for
livestreamed concerts, as well as the PRO’s
recently-launched Encore! program that is
significantly boosting the amount of money
it pays out to members for livestreamed
concerts on Facebook and Instagram.
This interview is edited for length and
clarity. For the full conversation, listen to
the May 27, 2020, episode of the Canadian
Musician Podcast.
CM: Usually, in terms of recorded music
on streaming services, there are the
rights to the sound recording and the
rights to the composition, and on both
sides of that there is the performance
right and the reproduction right. When
we’re talking livestreaming, does this
get more or less complicated?
Jenn Brown: More! [laughs]. I think it gets
more complicated because we haven’t seen
a static livestreaming platform or service yet;
I think everybody is coming out with something
a bit different. Part of the complexity
right now is that there isn’t an overarching
answer to this question about which rights
belong in livestreaming, so it requires talking
to all the platforms and services individually
about what they’re doing.
TERRA LIGHTFOOT PERFORMS A LIVESTREAMED CONCERT VIA FACEBOOK LIVE
Off the bat, we know that there’s performing
rights. But has the concert been
recorded for a later viewing? Then we can
talk about reproduction rights, and a lot of
different factors come into that. And then
if a reproduction right is needed, as for
a licence, then there is also the potential
for a sync licence as well. So, this is something
that the publishers are also working
through to make sure that they have really
clear criteria about when they would be
issuing sync licences, as well.
CM: Prior to the pandemic, was this
something that was really top-of-mind
for SOCAN and other rights agencies?
Brown: Not at all. We do have agreements
in place, like the Facebook/Instagram
one that specifically lists livestreams as a
use within that agreement, but it wasn’t
something that was talked about much.
We didn’t have a distribution rule in place
for these livestreams, so that was part of
the reason we launched Encore! – to make
sure we knew exactly what the criteria
would be to pay out these concerts online
and to be able to communicate to our
members, “Make sure you’re sending us
these setlists so that you can get paid.”
CM: Some of these platforms that
have become popular during the pandemic
shutdowns and are being used
for music, such as Zoom, were never
thought of as performance platforms.
As such, rights organizations like
SOCAN never thought to get them
licenced for that purpose. Does that
mean if someone does a livestreamed
concert on Zoom or another unlicensed
platform, they can’t get their
performance royalties?
Brown: Not yet, only because it hasn’t
been licenced yet. But we are in talks. We
did not have a Zoom licence for music
two months ago and we did not have
them on our target list of people to be
contacting. We are in touch with them
now and we’re also trying to figure out
how much it’s them, and how much it’s
promoters putting on those concerts,
because that’s a typical avenue as well,
[where] promoters are the ones organizing
the shows, selling the tickets, and then
they would pay the licence fees quite often.
That’s another angle as well.
10 CANADIAN MUSICIAN