Canada's CMRRA distributed over CA$57 million to its members in 2020

By Emmanuel Legrand

The Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency (CMRRA), has distributed over CA$57 million dollars in 2020 to its membership – music publishers and self-published songwriters. 

  However, the SoundExchange-owned company did not disclose figures for 2019 and whether or not the Toronto-based mechanical agency had been affected by the Covid pandemic.  

  The only details available about the 2020 performance were related to online streaming distributions, which increase by more than 17% compared to 2019’s distributions.

Renewed focus on rights and royalties

  “We know how significantly the music industry has been affected by the global pandemic,” said CMRRA President Paul Shaver (pictured, below). "The live sector has been decimated by venue closures, festival shutdowns and tour cancellations. At the same time, it’s also resulted in a renewed focus on rights and royalties. Catalogue sales have been making news headlines."

  Shaver added: "During the lockdown, commercial radio revenues received by CMRRA were down by 30% in 2020. We know how important it is for royalty payments to reach people right now and we’re thrilled that we were able to process and distribute over 57 million dollars of mechanical royalties in 2020 to music publishers and self-published songwriters."

  Recent business announcements included the launch in March 2021 of a new International Collections service, allowing clients to expand their collection territories for digital mechanical royalties, thanks to partnerships with the USA's new Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) and London-based IMPEL, the licensing agency for independent publishers. 

Improving processing technology

  CMRRA also announced recently a series of new licensing deals, in particular in June 2021 with short video format app TikTok, as well as with music streaming platform Qobuz, indigenous music preservation service Indigenous Cloud, ACX music – operator of the Ultimate Fighting Championship streaming application–, and classical streaming service Primephonic. CMRRA also renewed its licensing agreement with independent artists' platform Soundcloud.

  CMRRA, which has a repertoire database of over 40 million musical works, said in a statement that it had been investing in "an improved processing technology platform that will directly impact and improve processing for collections and distributions."