What is a collecting society?
June 07, 2023
Often misunderstood, collective management societies are organizations that artists and craftspeople in the music industry should know about. For artists, they can be a very important source of income.
The purpose of these societies is to manage rights that would be too complicated for an artist to manage alone, even impossible. For example, it would be very difficult for a copyright-holding artist to collect payment from every radio station that has made a copy of his or her music in order to play it. And let's not forget that there may be several songs' worth of rights to manage, and that these rights are often shared by several artists (performer, accompanying musician, etc.) on the same work. In such cases, collecting societies are a great help, and even a necessity since they collect royalties on your behalf.
How do collecting societies work?
Collective societies issue licenses, i.e. they authorize the use of your works under certain conditions, to users such as concert halls, bars, businesses, radio stations or online listening platforms, who must, in return, pay to use them. The collecting societies are responsible for collecting the royalties due for these uses and distributing them to those entitled to them.
Strictly in music, there are a considerable number of societies for different rights, all over the world. In Canada, many people have heard of SOCAN1, which generally administers copyright for songwriters.
In Quebec, the Copyright Act also confers rights on performers and producers, also known as "neighbouring rights".
For producers of sound recordings and music videos, Soproq2 administers neighboring rights, while Artisti (created by the UDA) does the same for performers.
In Canada, there are also similar societies that are generally more present in the English-speaking world: CONNECT, which is an equivalent of Soproq, while MROC3 and RACS4 are equivalents of Artisti.
While it's easy to get lost among all these acronyms, a good understanding of these organizations will help you collect the money you're owed. Better still, thanks to strength in numbers, some societies like Artisti represent the interests of their members to the industry and government, with the aim of strengthening artists' rights.
1. SOCAN: Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada
2. Soproq: Société de gestion collective des droits des producteurs de phonogrammes et de vidéogrammes (founded by ADISQ)
3. MROC: Musicians' Rights Organization Canada
4. RACS: Recording Artists' Collecting Society
Résonance is a new column for artists and artisans in the music industry, covering a wide range of topics related to professional practrice and career management. Created at the request of members of the Regroupement des artisans de la musique (RAM), the column will be published monthly.
