What if RadioPro was a Collective Management Organisation (CMO)?

Dear friends,

As you all know, we do not include our own music in the RadioPro repertoire. We have covered this before: to qualify as an Independent Management Entity, we have to meet the definition given in the second paragraph of Article 3 of the “DIRECTIVE 2014/26/EU OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 26 February 2014 on collective management of copyright and related rights and multi-territorial licensing of rights in musical works for online use in the internal market” (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32014L0026):

“independent management entity’ means any organisation which is authorised by law or by way of assignment, licence or any other contractual arrangement to manage copyright or rights related to copyright on behalf of more than one rightholder, for the collective benefit of those rightholders, as its sole or main purpose, and which is:

(i) neither owned nor controlled, directly or indirectly, wholly or in part, by rightholders; and

(ii) organised on a for-profit basis;”

It is not that we do not want our works in the IME repertoire. We simply cannot add them: our company is a limited company on a for-profit basis, so under that paragraph of Directive 2014/26/EU it cannot be controlled directly or indirectly by rightholders.

So here is the question now on the table. Would it be better to “upgrade” our IME and become an independent Collective Management Organisation (CMO)? That would let us grow the repertoire by a further 10,000 tracks held by our provider in the USA, RadioPro LLC.

The obstacle is the work involved. We would have to change the structure of the company and rewrite our articles of incorporation and memorandum to satisfy the Collective Rights Management Directive (2014/26/EU), which was implemented into UK law through the relevant Regulations on 10 April 2016.

On the one hand, every artist would become a member of RadioPro Ltd, which would give us full transparency. On the other, the workload is considerable if we are to do it properly.

It is a genuinely hard decision.

Regards,

The RadioPro Team