Dear friends,
all of you know that we are not including our own music to the RadioPro repertoire. We already covered this and we explained that in order to be an Independent Management Entity, we have to follow 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 to include our works in the IME repertoire, we simply can not, since our company is an LTD (a for-profit basis), we can not be controlled directly or indirectly by rightholders, according to the previous paragraph of the Directive 2014/26/EU!
The idea on the table is if it would be better to “upgrade” our IME and become an independent Collective Management Organization (CMO). That would allow us to grow our repertoire by 10.000 more tracks from RadioPro LLC which belong to our provider in the USA.
The only thing holding us back is that we have to change the structure of our company, our company articles of incorporation and memorandum, in order to satisfy the Collective Rights Management Directive (2014/26/EU), which was implemented into UK law via the above Regulations on 10 April 2016.
On the one side, all of the artists would become members of RadioPro Ltd, allowing full transparency. On the other hand, the work load is too high, if we do this right.
It is truly a hard decision to be made!
Regards,
The RadioPro Team