At Rightsify we’re all about making sure rights holders get paid when their music is played, anywhere in the world and from any usage.

As we noted in a previous article, In Store Music, the practice of music being played in public and businesses is the most underrated and untapped revenue stream for rights holders, a sector which just a few years ago was estimated to be worth around €2.35 billion ($2.53 billion USD and growing).

Today, we are happy to be rolling out our new program for rights holders to monetize their music in public, Rightsify Direct. Rightsify Direct is a direct licensing program where we license our members music for public performance in businesses while our members get paid directly from us every month. By giving our members a way for them to directly monetize their music from public businesses, this introduces a fresh and innovative model for them to get paid from their music. While the online streaming and sync licensing marketplaces tend to be crowded and saturated, Rightsify Direct opens up new doors in a global market for rights holders everywhere. 

Historically, there has been no way for music usage to be tracked when played in public. Either businesses don’t report the data to collection societies or legacy background music service providers don’t collect and track all the usage data of the music that is played.

With Rightsify Direct, we track what music is played so our members get paid accurately and in a timely manner.

To join Rightsify direct and start monetizing your music, apply for membership today and we’ll get back to you shortly.

When most rights holders think of monetizing their music, they think of traditional avenues such as streaming and download royalties or sync licenses and live performance, but one of the biggest and most ignored revenue streams for rights holders is In Store Music. In Store Music is when music is played in public businesses such as bars, cafes, hotels, restaurants, retail stores and other physical business establishments.

Traditionally, these types of businesses have had to pay their local PRO or collection society in order to play music in public, this license they would obtain gave them a blanket license to play all of the music in a societies repertoire, which in most cases covers all major label pop music plus wide amounts of independent music. The license that is issued to these businesses is called a ‘Public Performance License’, which grants the music user the right to ‘publicly perform the music’ , meaning they can play the music as background in their business and make money while doing so. 

The Reality: 

The reality with this system however, is that there has historically been no way for rights holders to get paid accurately when their music is played in public. For example, let’s say there’s a small business called ‘Jim’s Cafe’ which gets a license from his local collection society and then plays music from his personal iTunes collection, there is simply no way to account to rights holders what music was played, then when you add up businesses like Jim’s cafe and apply that to most businesses in almost every country, you have a lot of royalties slipping through the cracks that rights holders simply aren’t being paid on an accurate basis.

The way collection societies have historically paid un-trackable income like this to their members has been via a variety of methods that simply haven’t stood the test of time. For example, many societies calculate who should be paid public performance royalties by analyzing a model based on commercial radio play. In an age where data can be organized and collected efficiently and music breaks online, not on radio, this is both an unfair and outdated system. 

Overall, public performance license income collected globally is in the billions. According to a global association of collection societies, Paris based CISAC states that of the €8.9 billion collected from their members during 2014, €2.35 billion (26%) of this was for performing rights in the ‘live and background’ space, a major amount and when there is no accurate and detailed reporting of what music was played, that’s a major problem that needs fixing for rights holders all over the world. 

To give more context on the amount of revenue rights holders are missing out on with In Store Music, in 2016 Spotify paid out just over one billion dollars to rights holders, while YouTube paid out about one billion itself. So based on the numbers compiled from CISAC, an equal amount or possibly an even greater amount is collected from the ‘live and background’ space when compared to the two biggest music streaming services in the world. When you think of the amount of press coverage and industry attention the digital streaming side of the music industry gets compared to In Store music, those are eye-opening statistics for rights holders who prioritize almost all of their monetization efforts online.

The Solution: 

Here at Rightsify, we came to the conclusion that while most personal music consumption and discovery activity is based online, a massive amount of the revenue being generated is out there in the offline world. 

With our In Store Music service, our aim is modernize the public performance licensing system by connecting music users that need music to play in their business with independent rights holders that can easily collect royalties when their music is played in public. By doing this, we are able to provide music users a more cost-effective music license while enabling rights holders to get accurately paid every month for royalties they most likely wouldn’t have been paid otherwise. 

By delivering music via our online platform, we are able to issue licenses to music users while tracking the data of every song that is played, at what time, and from which businesses and countries, thereby enabling rights holders to maximize their royalty earnings and making sure that whenever their music is played, they get paid. 

When most artists, managers, or other music rights holders from the west think about the music industry, they generally think North America, Europe, Australia/NZ and Japan. While those countries do comprise a wide majority of music industry revenues, they only consist of around 20% of the entire world’s population.  

Generally, emerging markets have been ignored by the music industry at large due to piracy and cultural barriers, but in todays mobile-first, streaming world with content available on numerous legal streaming services, accessing legal music has never been easier. 

Why Emerging Markets:

– Population Size: 

As noted above, almost 80% of the world’s population is being ignored by most of the western music industry. From China and India, to Myanmar and Vietnam, the middle-class and millennial generations are growing rapidly in these countries and can become massive markets for the music industry for decades to come. 

– Internet access:

While internet access is now widely available in most emerging markets, stable connections for streaming content are not, the same goes for credit card access. This is why you see streaming services partnering with local telcos in emerging markets so they can take care of the billing process via their phone bill in addition to offering offline cache features.

– Monetization methods:

The first and most simple method of monetizing music in emerging markets is the live space. When there is demand, nothing beats a live performance where the booking fee is upfront and committed. 

Where things get more complicated is with licensing music and royalty collection. Traditional royalty share/back-end deals are becoming more common in countries such as China, but royalty reporting is simply not up to the standards that most rights holders in the west are used to. Blanket licensing and one-off fees are the most common form of monetization, whether it be a sync licensing or a streaming service. 

How to Grow Your Music Business in Emerging Markets

– Marketing your music:

The first key to monetizing your music in emerging markets is to build awareness and demand. Marketing your music in emerging markets has never been easier with geo-targeting tools in social media platforms such as Facebook. Other marketing methods in emerging markets can be partnering with brands to sponsor releases or working with local PR agencies.

– Working with local booking agents:

When it comes to booking live performances and touring in emerging markets it’s ideal to have a credible local agent who knows the local promoters and scene as opposed to working with your agents from afar. While communication is easy across the world, knowing who you are dealing with on the ground makes things easier. 

– Collecting royalties via Rightsify:

At Rightsify, we work with music rights holders to collect their royalties from emerging markets via direct licensing. Whether it be for sync licenses on TV, web videos or as part of our In Store Music service, we provide rights holders with a method to monetize their music across emerging markets. 

At Rightsify we work with music catalogues both big and small. From independent artists with just a few songs, to labels and publishers with tens of thousands of songs. One thing every rights holder wants is to save time and uploading music can be a time-consuming task.

So today, we are happy to be introducing our new bulk-upload feature. With the new feature, you can simply drag and drop your mp3 or wav files into your account so you can upload multiple tracks at once instead of uploading one by one. 

– To access, login to your account, go to the ‘Deliver’ menu then click ‘Upload Music‘.

– Upload up to 100mb worth of files at one time, whether mp3 or wav.

– Once uploaded, you can simply attach these files to the metadata of songs you are registering with Rightsify.

 Have any questions? Just let us know!