At a breakout session for the Future of Music Policy Summit in DC this week, online music distributors complained that licensing music for digital retail is still far too complicated, and blamed this complication for the paucity of online distribution outside of the US market. Speaking for the Digital Media Association (DiMA), which represents Napster, Youtube, Rhapsody, iTunes, and a number of other services, Jonathan Potter told the panel audience that lawyers and licensing issues are enormous financial drags on his association s member companies. Finding the owners for the song publication rights for a given song is extremely difficult, he said, and the $150,000 possible penalty for infringement makes any mistake extremely costly.
That s not a problem if you re AllOfMP3.com, he joked. Tim Quirk, executive editor for Rhapsody, agreed with Potter, explaining that for his company has been forced to create an extensive database of creators, owners, and granted rights, because the licensing companies themselves do not track this information, or regard it as secret and won t share it.
The Harry Fox Agency, for example, owns around 70 percent of the mechanical licenses for musical recordings, Quirk said, but it forces distributors to submit lists of both the song and the songwriter in order to get the license. If any of the information is not an exact match for the licensor s data, the request is returned as not recognized, no, or pending. When Rhapsody and other services ask for a list of songs available for licensing instead of filing individual requests, they re told that the information is proprietary, said Quirk.
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