The SOCAN licence is an enabler that allows music users to increase the success of their businesses. For decades, SOCAN has been working diligently to ensure that music users can acquire a licence to deal with new technologies as they arrive, ranging from radio and television all those years ago to recent innovations such as ringtones, Internet and satellite radio.

There is no doubt that technological advances are not only continuing unabated but are in fact arriving at an accelerating pace. Therefore, it is important for SOCAN to remain ahead of the curve on new uses and methods to deliver your musical works to your audience. And not just to your audience in Canada but also to the global audience. We are clearly moving into a brave new world, one that SOCAN is excited to be a part of.

The process surrounding the monetization of music usage via new media involves all aspects of SOCAN’s operations. The establishment of a Copyright Board-approved tariff is the beginning of the process. The approved tariffs represent the foundation. The next step is to collect the appropriate licence fees and secure performance information. In these areas, SOCAN’s Licensing and Distribution Operations departments are open for business.

By working closely with new-media music users, we ensure that licence fees are collected but also that we gather unprecedented amounts of data related to performances. These performance data are matched against our database of registered works, forming the basis used for royalty distribution to you, our members. This is how clicks are turned into bucks.

After years of work, legal challenges and the development of information technology, and armed with new relationships with music users, we are moving towards our first new-media distributions. Our first ringtones distribution will be undertaken later this year. The SOCAN Internet tariff, approved last year, is undergoing judicial review. Once the tariff is finalized, we will be proceeding with distributions, likely in 2010.

More recently, as you will read elsewhere in this issue, the Satellite Radio tariff (Tariff 25) has been approved by the Copyright Board. As I write this, we do not know if the music users will be seeking a judicial review of this tariff.

Our work is never done. There are still customers to license and data to collect. In addition, there will be new uses of music that will need to be included in a tariff structure. Some of these new uses have not been contemplated yet, but SOCAN will be there to help ensure that music users are given the licensing tools to increase their business through the use of music. And, it goes without saying, to ensure that you are fairly compensated for your work.

We would not have it any other way.

Uploaded Summer 2009

Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
Send them to Rick MacMillan, Words & Music Corporate Editor, at wordsandmusic@socan.ca