Copyright Royalty Board is going to increase royalty rates for musicians and publishers

Behind every royalty, every streaming payout, and every sync license, there’s a copyright and a copyright owner. If you ever want to earn money on musical composition or sound recording, and if you’re going to protect that right and ensure that people aren’t stealing your work, you need to know your copyright protections. 

But the music copyright landscape is notoriously complicated. There are different copyrights for different parts of a musical work, with copyright ownership and royalties split between artists, songwriters, labels, and publishers (the specific nature of those splits is a subject of negotiation). Then, there is various middleman, from collection agencies to distributors, that facilitate the collection of royalties on behalf of rights holders.

The Copyright Royalty Board is going to increase royalty rates for musicians and publishers.Originally decided back in 2018, the new headline rate sees an increase from 10.5 per cent to 15.1 per cent over theist four years.

The increase in rates, which amounts to 44 percent, follows a long battle with streaming platforms like Amazon Music, Spotify and YouTube.The percentage of label revenue (the TCC rate) has also been capped, meaning  publishers will only be able to receive a limited royalty rate.

Spotify has come under criticism previously for its low artist payments, with the likes of David Byrne, producer Tony Visconti and David Crosby all criticising the platform.

Visconti described the streaming service as “disgusting” over its low payments to artists. “Spotify is disgusting, the money they make out of [artists],” he said. “If you had 12 million streams, you could barely afford lunch for two people. It’s ridiculous, I don’t know why it’s allowed. Spotify does nothing to support the culture of music.”

In 2013 Byrne criticised the “pittance” artists are paid while David Crosby said recently: “I don’t like any of the streamers, because they don’t pay us properly. Their proportion is wrong. They’re making billions with a ‘b’ and they’re paying out pennies with a ‘p.’”

How to avoid Copyright Infringement:

Copyright is one of several categories of intellectual property (IP) protection, designed to safeguard the creator's, owner's, or holder's exclusive right to claim an original work as their own—when the work is fixed in a tangible medium.

As soon as a work is written on paper, recorded digitally, or typed electronically—or anything that can be heard, seen, read, or touched—the work is granted copyright protection, normally for a limited period of time.

The U.S. Copyright Act of 1970 was enacted to protect creative works from unauthorized use or copyright infringement. However, despite federal law, which prohibits individuals from copying, publishing, transmitting, exhibiting, distributing, modifying, displaying, or otherwise using (whether for profit or not) the original creative expressions of others, copyright infringement—intentional and inadvertent—still can and does occur.