M
ANY UP-AND-
coming dance
music creators say
that hearing one of
their songs during
a festival set is a
dream come true. For those with writ-
ing credits, however, collecting the
public performance royalties can be a
nightmare.
Every time a DJ plays a track by
another artist during a live set —
whether at a massive festival or a
tiny nightclub — the songwriter and
publisher of that track are entitled
to public performance royalties.
(The same goes for music played by
garden-variety wedding or bar mitz-
vah DJs.) This money is paid out from
the license fee paid by the festival pro-
moter or venue to PROs, or perform-
ing rights organizations. These PROs
— which in the United States include
ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR —
monitor public performances of their
members’ compositions at licensed
venues, then compensate members
out of the money they collect.
In the world of dance music, how-
ever, that process gets tricky. Because
DJ sets typically feature many differ-
ent songs by many different artists and
writers — often remixed, altered in
pitch or sampled only briefly — PROs
have a harder time monitoring what
gets played. As a result, collected
fees often end up in the wrong hands
— or not paid out at all. In 2016, the
nonprofit Association for Electronic
Music (AFEM) projected that dance
music producers missed out on an es-
timated $120 million in royalties from
live performances.
Now, a number of music recogni-
tion technologies (MRTs), includ-
ing BMAT, YACAST and Pioneer’s
KUVO, can make the monitoring
and reporting of DJ sets easier and
more accurate. One of them, the
Amsterdam-based DJ Monitor, func-
tions much like Shazam, identifying
tracks within its library — a database
of nearly 80 million songs submitted
to DJ Monitor by PROs — and creat-
ing setlists with 93% accuracy, the
company reports. MRT companies
make money by selling data to PROs.
MRT has been widely adopted
throughout Europe and Australia,
where the dance music industry
has historically been robust. So far,
though, U.S. PROs have not followed
suit. Instead, stateside PROs deter-
mine live performance royalties using
two methods. The first is estimating
what’s played at any given club or
festival based on songs performed on
top-grossing concert tours, in other
selected major venues and on the
radio. Given the niche nature of many
dance genres, however, these esti-
mates seldom reflect what’s actually
being played.
“When you’re talking about elec-
tronic music, where people are going
out to hear drum-and-bass or techno,
there’s no correlation at all between
what’s played [in a DJ set] and on the
radio,” says AFEM GM Greg Marshall.
“That’s why it’s an issue for electronic
music more than any other genre.”
The second method: PROs also
collect fees based on setlists submit-
ted manually by DJs after each set,
a straightforward yet tedious piece
of housekeeping many ignore. It’s
common for artists to simply submit a
list of their own music when asked, if
they’re even asked at all: One man-
ager for an electronic music act tells
Billboard that while European events
routinely request setlists, U.S. festivals
never do.
DJs with big radio hits are more
likely to report their sets, given that
royalties for these songs are more
likely to be accurately tracked by
traditional PRO methods. But artists
can’t access money that PROs don’t
track, so the process is harder for less-
er-known songwriters and publishers.
“Without MRT,” says DJ Monitor
CEO Yuri Dokter, “it is almost impos-
sible to pay rights holders correctly.”
Currently, no U.S. PROs have
formally partnered with an MRT
company, though DJ Monitor is
starting a pilot program for an un-
disclosed U.S. PRO. While festival
promoters and club owners do not
pay more in licensing fees when an
MRT is installed, Marshall believes
the relatively small amount of dance
music controlled by PROs, along
with the massive size of the country,
do not incentivize PROs to update
their methods. Meanwhile, Dokter
says U.S. songwriters and publishers
are generally unaware of MRTs that
would help them collect more accu-
rate royalties.
Progress is being made internation-
ally, however, with major festivals
including Tomorrowland, Paroo-
kaville, Timewarp, Sonar and most
Dutch events all under contract with
DJ Monitor. The Netherlands is a
worldwide leader in accurate royalty
collection, given the size of the coun-
try’s dance industry and its financial
importance to Dutch PROs Buma/
Stemra and Sena. Australia, the United
Kingdom and France are also catch-
ing up with MRT, with PROs in Peru,
Guatemala and beyond following
suit. Says Dokter: “We feel that every
[PRO] has a moral obligation toward
their members, authors, artists, labels
and publishers to use the best technol-
ogy available on the market.”
FOLLOW THE MONEY
New technology could help songwriters collect missing public performance royalties from DJ sets
BY KATIE BAIN
ILLUSTRATION BY CATHRYN VIRGINIA
DANCE 2020
46 BILLBOARD • MARCH 14, 2020