For rights holders of all kinds, whether an artist, label, or publisher it’s always nice to have an additional revenue stream in addition to your royalties, which is why today we are rolling out our Referral Program at Righstify. 

With our Referral Program you can refer your friends and fellow rights holders to Rightsify and in return you get a commission of our share of the royalties collected, and you’ll also get paid every month.

How it Works

1. From your Rightsify account, you can find your referral code under the ‘Referrals’ tab.

2. To send it to your friends, you can either email them directly from your Rightsify account or just copy and paste the code into an email or chat message.

3. When your friends sign up using your referral code, our system tracks that you referred them and you’ll earn 10% of Rightsify’s share of the royalties. You can track your new referrals from your account in real-time and will receive your commission along with your royalty payments each month.

Where does the Commission come from?

The referral commission is derived entirely from Rightsify’s revenue earned from the referred member, so if you refer a friend this does not affect their earnings on Rightsify in any way.

How much can I earn through the Referral Program?

The Referral commission is 10% from our share of the referred members royalties. There’s no limit or cap to how much you can earn through the Referral Program.

Is there a limit to how many people I can invite through the Referral Program?

You can invite as many rights holders as you please. Note, that not all rights holders are accepted to join Rightsify but we don’t limit or cap your invites.

If you have any questions about the Referral Progam, just let us know.

If not, you can get started here.

Update: We are no longer offering Neighboring Rights services at Rightsify. Join us in our next chapter of making sure artists are paid accurately when their music is played in businesses with Righsify Direct.

A couple questions that rights holders ask us when inquiring about our Neighboring Rights service are firstly:

 “What are Neighboring Rights and how do I collect them?”

The second goes along the lines of:

“In todays age of digital music consumption, how are Neighboring Rights becoming a more prominent revenue stream for rights holders despite being mostly based on the analog model?”

There are a couple key reasons for why analog-based Neighboring Rights revenue streams are still going strong (and growing) which we’ve outlined below.

Public Performance:

Although personal music consumption these days is overwhelmingly digital with streaming and downloads, physical businesses just haven’t stopped playing music overnight. Both Publishing and Neighboring Rights societies all over the world collect license fees from businesses for the right to play music, these sums collected in many countries are almost equivalent to the amounts collected from Radio and Television. 

As we mentioned in our last article we also license businesses directly at Rightsify so we can track all music usage and pay rights holders every time their music is played in public, this is something we see as a major trend across both Neighboring and Publishing Rights moving forward as all rights holders want transparency and accountability when their music is used.

Television:

 

Another trend we all hear about a lot these days is how ‘tv is in decline’ and how we are in the age of ‘cable cutters’. While these fears are mostly overblown, this is in fact a growing trend with millennials in the United States, however, TV and cable subscriptions are actually a major growth businesses in emerging markets like India and across the entire Asia Pacific region as a whole. While more countries are starting to recognize and enforce Neighboring Rights the royalties generated from Television are likely to grow.

Radio: 

Although many internet radio and streaming services are now pre-installed into car stereos, depending on where you are driving you might not be able to sustain a stable connection for streaming music which can no doubt take all the enjoyment out of it, hence many people still wanting AM/FM radio in their cars. 

To give you an idea, a 2014 survey from all 28 European Union countries notes that 53% of Europeans over the age of 15 years old listened to the radio daily.

So as you can see, Neighboring Rights royalties are derived from some of the things we all do every day, whether it’s listening to radio in the car, watching television at night or the music being played at your local cafe. Due to these all being such prominent types of music usage we don’t see analog based Neighboring Rights revenues declining or going away anytime soon.

Update: We are no longer offering Neighboring Rights services at Rightsify. Join us in our next chapter of making sure artists are paid accurately when their music is played in businesses with Rightsify Direct.

Neighboring Rights are an often misunderstood and overlooked part of the music industry but they are also one of the most valuable. In this blog post we’ll go over the different types of music usage that generate Neighboring Rights royalties as well as how you can collect them internationally in the fastest time possible.

What They are:

Neighboring Rights are the rights of ‘Performers’ and ‘Producers’, or in everyday terms: Artists and Labels. They have almost the equivalent structure of Publishing Rights but instead of being for Songwriters and Publishers they are for the artist and label and revolve around the sound recording rights of a track.

Neighboring Rights Royalty Sources:

Neighboring Rights royalties come from quite a few diverse sources, while not having as many revenue streams as Publishing, the amounts of Neighboring Rights royalties collected globally are growing year over year.

 – Radio Broadcast (AM/FM): 

This is your standard analog radio that you play in your car. In most countries that recognize Neighboring Rights, radio stations are required to keep a ‘log’ of the music they have played which they report to their local collection society. If your tracks are registered and the society finds airplay they then payout your royalties in their next reporting period.

Some societies will hold unclaimed royalties for a few years, however most tend to payout unclaimed royalties to their members based on market share so having your tracks registered with each society is an absolute must in order to collect your full share.

 – Internet Radio/Non-Interactive Streaming: 

This is your internet radio services like Pandora and Beats1. So streaming media, without the playlists and custom functionalities of Apple Music, Spotify, etc.

While the royalty rates are generally lower from Internet Radio than they are from analog, if your music is being played a lot on internet radio services around the world this can be a nice supplemental income stream.

 – Public Performance: 

This is when your music is played in public. for example, at a bar, cafe, hotel, restaurant or retail shop. Historically, Public Performance has been a hard usage method to track what music has been played so the royalties are generally paid out to society members based on market share.

At Rightsify, we also issue direct licenses to public businesses so when a rights holders music is played in public, they get paid for every single play.

 – Cable Transmission: 

Cable Transmission, in short, is when your music is played on television and delivered via a cable or satellite connection. Like with radio, the TV stations report their usage to local societies and then payout these royalties if your tracks are registered.

– Private Copying: 

The Private Copy Levy can be summed up as a fee on the hardware manufacturers of blank audio media that is paid to collection societies. Private Copy royalties are generated from smartphones, tablets, laptops, DVD’s, CD’s as well as USB sticks.

Each country has it’s own unique methods of how they both collect and distribute Private Copy royalties. The WIPO has made a great country, process and fee breakdown that can be read here. The amounts paid from the societies to rights holders for Private Copying are largely dependent on sales data, so providing evidence of your royalty statements from your distributor or label are needed in this case.

How To Collect

The easiest way to start collecting your Neighboring Rights royalties is to affiliate with your local collection society, in the UK that would be PPL and in Australia that would be PPCA. In the US, Neighboring Rights aren’t fully recognized but SoundExchange does collect significant royalties from internet radio platforms like Pandora and Beats1.

However, with Neighboring Rights, once it gets past domestic revenue collecting gets much trickier. For example, at Rightsify we collect Neighboring Rights royalties directly from the source in over 50 countries, we work with both international societies as well as issuing direct licenses to certain music users. Some societies do offer an international collection service, but similar to Publishing this can ultimately lead to waiting two years or more to get paid when your music has been used. Also, a lot of the societies don’t report all music usage to foreign societies so it helps to be registered directly in each country to ensure you get paid in full and get paid faster.

How To Join Rightsify

If you are an artist or record label and own or administer the rights to your sound recordings, we offer both global and territorial deals so you can start collect your Neighboring Rights royalties. Get in touch with us today to get started.

When we launched Rightsify in early 2015 we set out to provide music rights holders with an all-in-one dashboard where they can view metrics and in-depth analytics from all of their music royalty sources in one place, whether sound recording or publishing.

However, the main issue we ran into is that most of the data and statements that rights holders receive from their representatives is anywhere from one month to two years old, which left a major issue with some of our earliest users – They just couldn’t use that data to make important decisions.

For example, if your sub-publisher accounts to you every 6 months, your distributor every 3 months and your PRO pays you international performance income two years after airplay, the data just isn’t as valuable as it would be if it was coming into their dashboard on a monthly or weekly basis, or even better, in real-time.

Becoming More Involved

Besides the data being uploaded to the platform being old and not as current as rights holders would have liked, we also felt that we should be more involved in the process in order to do our job better. By moving from a subscription model to commission, we are more invested in the success of our members.

So as opposed to just taking a recurring subscription fee and providing technical support, the new goal at Rightsify is all about maximizing your revenues and getting you paid faster.

This all started when we rolled out our Sample Pack Distribution Service back in May of last year which helps artists and music producers sell new and existing sounds from their library on digital download stores such as Beatport, Producer Loops and ADSR Sounds. While sample packs and sounds for music production are a strong and significant revenue stream, it is one that is unfortunately often overlooked and ignored by the industry at large, we have been expanding upon this service in recent months by providing rights holders with a new, stable revenue stream along with monthly payments and a full analytics dashboard.

How we are expanding

By directly integrating and working with music users and societies across the globe, we are able to increase royalty income for our members while also getting them paid faster than the traditional system by eliminating reporting delays and unnecessary commissions.

Our new services cover both Neighboring Rights and Publishing Rights, so across the board whether you’re an artist/record label or a writer/publisher you can use the service to start collecting more royalties from more places. As of launch, we are collecting royalties in over 50 countries for music rights holders of any type.

Neighboring Rights

Once dismissed as just another industry buzzword, Neighboring Rights have been picking up a significant amount of traction in recent years as artists and record labels look for additional revenue streams to supplement falling downloads and increased streaming consumption.

To break it down for those that still aren’t sure what exactly Neighboring Rights are – Neighboring Rights are for artists and record labels what Publishing is for songwriters and publishers.

Meaning that if John Smith records a song and owns his own label, he is entitled to what is called a ‘Performers Share’ as well as a ‘Producers Share’. In some countries, the societies even allocate a designated % for background performers or engineers, often referred to as ‘non-featured performers’.

Neighboring Rights are currently recognized in over 90 countries across the globe and are starting to be more enforced on a national level across both emerging and established markets. The lions share of the revenue comes from societies in Europe, which acknowledge Neighboring Rights all across the 28-nation union. The USA, while generating significant revenues via SoundExchange, does not recognize nor payout Neighboring Rights revenues for ‘offline’ methods of music usage, such as TV/Radio broadcast or public businesses. Neighboring Rights are starting to be more enforced across the developing world in South America, Africa and the Asia Pacific which all look to be promising growth markets going forward.

Publishing Rights

More well known and utilized throughout the industry than Neighboring Rights, our Publishing Rights platform is taking a different approach from some of the legacy models of music publishing. While we are still involved in the established model of local registration in each territory to expedite and ensure proper payments throughout each market, we are also putting resources into direct licenses across the developing world and monetizing new revenue streams where societies aren’t collecting many royalties on behalf of rights holders.

By combining a multi-right royalty collection service under one roof we intend to break down the dated and unnecessary barriers between the Recording and Publishing sides of the music business and to ensure that anywhere in the world, when a rights holders music is played, they get paid.