AMLC founders outline their Mechanical Licensing Collective project

By Emmanuel Legrand

The team behind the American Music Licensing Collective (AMLC) got to present its project in a Town Hall meeting in Nashville last week. The AMLC is one of the two entities competing for the ​role of Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) to be created as part of the Music Modernisation Act and tasked with issuing blanket licenses to streaming services for mechanical licenses, and to collect and distribute monies to the owners of songs, authors, composers and music publishers for the use of their works.

  The other project is put together by the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), alongside the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) and the Songwriters Of North America (SONA). It benefits from the support of NMPA's board as well as individual publishers such as Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner/Chappell and Sony/ATV, and also a wide range of organisations such as ASCAP, BMI, the RIAA or SoundExchange.

 

  The entity ​operating the MLC will be designated by the US Copyright Office (USCO), based on the merits of the project as well as the support it gets from the community. As part of the MMA, interested parties have until April 22 to express their views and support to any of the proposals on the USCO's web site.

 

  In Nashville, a panel regrouping AMLC's board or committee members gave a broad overview of their project. Speakers included Clearbox Music Publishing founder/CEO John Barker; Boogie Shack Music Group’s Hakim Draper; Songwriter’s Guild of America's president Rick Carnes; Audiam CEO Jeff Price; Union Music Group president Ricardo Ordonez and composer and performer​ Zoë​ Keating. All participants are either board members of committee members of the AMLC. (The session can be watched on the following YouTube video)

 

Fair to everybody

  "We have made a commitment that we are fit to do this and we are going to do this better than anyone else," said Barker. The point of the meeting, said Barker, was not to be negative about the NMPA's project, but just highlight why "our project is better." He added that the people behind the AMLC are "more diverse" and "tech savvy."
  "I truly believe that AMLC is here to protect songwriters and to get them paid," said Carnes, who reminded the audience that SGA's mission statement was two words: "Protect songwriters."

  "Are you building a solution that is going to be fair to everybody or a solution that is going to be fair for those who are already in there?" asked Draper, who added that the AMLC is a solution that will help those who do not usually get a seat at the table. Ordonez explained that a lot of the money collected for mechanicals does not get distributed and that the AMLC will help fix that problem.

  Keating picked up on the same topic and said that she was among those who could not get their mechanicals from overseas from example, as a self-published composer. "In order to survive in this era you have to maximise all your revenues streams from public performances to syncs, sounds recordings, etc. I am just interested in leveling the playing field for unaffiliated artists and removing the frictions from all the systems that get in the way of getting artists their royalties," said Keating. "I believe the AMLC will do the best job to do the work for songwriters like me."

 

  Price said the AMLC will be cheaper that its counterpart since it plans to outsource many of the functionalities of the collective, and rely on existing entities such as Music Report for its database, or Dataclef for its systems and as well as banks banks and royalty management services to handle the operational side. "We don't want to stop what is happening already, we want to make it better," he says.

Conflicts of interest

  In a blogpost, ​American composer and performer ​Zoë​ Keating​ said she joined the board of the AMLC because "I believe they will get mechanical royalties to the songwriters who earned them."  According to Keating, "There is a pot of an estimated $1.2 billion in unmatched mechanical royalties that have yet to be paid to the people who earned them. The streaming services were required to pay the royalties, not to match them. Making a system for connecting songs to owners and getting these black-box royalties to the people who earned them will be primary tasks of the new MLC.​"

 

  Keating also wrote that the key issue for self-published composers and songwriters like her is to have the guarantees that they will received what is their due. She believes that the AMLC will have "the least conflict of interest, the best technology proposal and the least incentive to recommend directing other people’s royalties to themselves, not to mention their budget is a fraction of the one proposed by the NMPA."

 

  Recently, the AMLC received the support of Fair Trade Music International, with which it signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that advances the adoption of Fair Trade Music principles of fairness, sustainability and transparency in the music ecosystem.

 

  Meanwhile, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) and the International Council for Music Creators (CIAM) issued a statement in regard to the MLC: “For the avoidance of doubt and in view of the different rumours circulating, CIAM and CISAC wish to clarify that the organisations have not endorsed either of the competing companies for the US MLC, nor has CIAM or CISAC taken any position with respect to the suitability of any candidate over the other for the role of the future MLC.”