Raphael Vassallo The Union of Musicians, Songwriters and Composers (UKAM) has seen its membership swell from around 80 to over 1,200 in just eight days, ahead of a meeting tomorrow to discuss the thorny issue of royalties owed to local artists since at least the 1990s.
“2 November is an important date for the local music industry,” Winter Moods frontman Ivan Grech wrote on UKAM’s Facebook page this week. “This is the time to get together and raise our voices. This is a fight for all local songwriters, singers, musicians, producers, recording engineers, music publishers and the media involved. This is not only about us, but also for the future of the local music industry.”
The issue concerns revelations by the London-based Performing Rights Society (PRS), licensed by the government of Malta to collect and distribute royalties to local artists, that the society had collected an average of €500,000 a year from Malta.
“Of the total collection for 2007, over half (52%) was paid to Maltese songwriters and composers for the use of their music on Malta,” PRS managing director Joe Prowse wrote in a letter to this newspaper last March. “This is in line with local music usage as determined by recent market research.”
However, this assertion appears to have infuriated local PRS members: some of whom claim to have been paid only a pittance for the airplay of their original work, while others claim to have received nothing at all.
Howard Keith, of production company Jagged House, confirmed this week that Maltese artists are still owed up to €200,000 for 2007 alone, while the amount in unpaid royalties dating back to the 1990s still has to be quantified.
Speaking to MaltaToday in April, Howard Keith had expressed local artists’ frustration in getting financially remunerated for their original work.
“The implemented system around the world is simple: what is collected should be distributed. But shared information between the top writers active for these past years unfortunately shows otherwise, and has raised the obvious questions. Where is the money being distributed, to whom (if anyone locally) and based on what information?”
Contacted this week, Howard Keith confirmed that a number of developments have since taken place, following an exchange of correspondence with representatives of the UK collecting society.
“PRS has agreed in principle to settle back payments. However, there has been no agreement on the precise sum of money to be paid out.”
Tomorrow’s meeting is expected to iron out the issue of precisely how much is owed to each local artist on the basis of local airplay and live performances. Also on the agenda is a proposed reform of the structures already in place to monitor the local airwaves, in order to guarantee fairness in distribution of royalties in years to come.
Maltese copyright law defines the obligations of a collecting society as including: the collection of fees from licensed establishments and broadcasting stations; the monitoring of local radio airplay and music played in all venues, as well as the distribution of royalties. But paid-up PRS members locally have long argued that this has never been properly implemented in Malta – not even after 2006, when the government re-licensed PRS as Malta’s official collecting society.
PRS is represented locally by Kevin Dingli of Dingli & Dingli law firm; but while the local agent separately confirmed the figures supplied by Joe Prowse, he also pointed out that his firm is responsible only for collection of fees, and not the distribution of royalties.
“The local copyright board should by now be in possession of the relevant accounts (for 2007),” he said earlier this year. “The situation is far clearer today than it has been in the past, and will become clearer in future.”
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