[cma-l] Free Community Radio Seminar

[andrew.wass at talk21.com]

Hi All,
At Desi Radio we are fortunate to have a large audience in West London, as a 
consequence we have local small businesses keen to advertise with us, our 
advertising income means that we pay a % of these revenues to both PRS and 
PPL each year. We feel aggrieved as not only should more of this money be 
invested in the station and its future, we also don't believe that any of the 
money finds its way to writers, arrangers, pulishers and performers that we 
play!
Desi plays a wide variety of Panjabi music, a lot of it traditional unattributed 
music, a lot of it made and published outside of India (PRS/PPL claim that they 
do collect on behalf of Indian authorities) we would like to see some evidence 
of where our contribution does go to!
We also have to prep quarterly returns, administer logging days and prepare 
through our accounts an annual return...... in exactlly the way a commercial 
station has to......... for thats the model it's based on. 

In short we pay a great deal of money to whom and for what?  in a way that takes 
energy and resources that could be used for social gain!!! Given the other 
issues that apply to stations around the country it feels like PRS and PPL need 
to reform the system for our sector!
See you at PRS on Tuesday.

Best Wishes
Andy Wass
Administrator/Manager
The Panjabi Centre/Desi Radio 




________________________________
From: Phil Gibbons <phil at bcfm.org.uk>
To: Two Lochs Radio <tlr at gairloch.co.uk>; ian at transplan.uk.com; Tom Buckham 
<t.buckham at futureradio.co.uk>; cma-l <cma-l at commedia.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, 25 March, 2011 12:48:17
Subject: Re: [cma-l] Free Community Radio Seminar


Thanks for this Alex,

Certainly some interesting suggestions which I will represent next week at  the 
seminar.

Could you clarify some of your figures/claims for me please so I can back them 
up if needed/challenged? 


‘that most of the royalties paid by the smallest stations do not in fact go to 
the artists and record companies, but in fact are spent on PPL admin overheads!’
Where is this referenced? This is a PRS seminar and not PPL remember.

‘the top earner gets over £0.5 million annually’
This is a disgrace if we can prove it. Where is this figure published please?

‘Overall PPL (for which I have figures) spends 15% of its gross income on 
overheads, but I would guess that in the not-for-profit sector this proportion 
is nearer 80%. ‘
Again, let’s not forget this is a PRS seminar and not PPL. I would be interested 
in receiving these figures please Alex if you could send me the source.

I will be there on Tuesday to represent the CMA in my capacity as Council Member 
and also as an interested stakeholder. I hope it will be a constructive and 
informative seminar and I will certainly bring everyone’s concerns to the table.

Regards

Phil



Phil Gibbons - Station Manager
phil at bcfm.org.uk

Bristol's Community radio station - Your voice - Your choice!
93.2fm in Bristol
Online at: www.bcfm.org.uk

0560 1126659 - Office Phone


www.bcfm.org.uk

The Beacon Centre
City Academy Bristol
Russell Town Avenue
Bristol
BS5 9JH


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From: Two Lochs Radio 
Sent: Friday, March 25, 2011 10:57 AM
To: ian at transplan.uk.com ; Tom Buckham ; phil at bcfm.org.uk ; cma-l 
Subject: Re: [cma-l] Free Community Radio Seminar
Spot on Ian! 
 
What is really galling is that PPL justify their substantial minimum raes (as 
opposed to proportional to use) by saying that it is necessary to cover 
administration costs with the smallest stations. In other words they are saying 
that most of the royalties paid by the smallest stations do not in fact go to 
the artists and record companies, but in fact are spent on PPL admin overheads! 
Although they are a 'not for profit' company like all of us, they do still 
maintain a large staff with well paid senior management (the top earner gets 
over £0.5 million annually), legal teams etc, who are paid for before remaining 
monies are distributed to rights holders. Overall PPL (for which I have figures) 
spends 15% of its gross income on overheads, but I would guess that in the 
not-for-profit sector this proportion is nearer 80%. 

 
Also last year PPL reported a £1m increase in revenue from radio broadcasters, 
despite by their figures, an 8% fall in commercial radio revenues. Also, for 
some reason they exclude the costs of their defined benefit pension scheme when 
calculating overheads.


PRS recorded around £15m increase in income over the same period of industry 
downturn, however it's overhead costs are lower, at around 10%, and it boasts of 
being "one of the world’s most efficient combined rights collecting operations". 

To take some round figures to put this into perspective, a typical broadcasting 
licensee has a minimum charge of around £600 and there are around 200 very small 
licensees who are likely to have genuine proprtional use more like an average 
of, say, £100. Those figures would mean PPL is costing the sector £100k per year 
in admin overheads that simply go to pay for staff to collect the money, while 
only £20k is passed on to rights holders. 

 
Not a very efficient system, to say the least, and a substantial drain on the 
community sector, and that's just for one collecting body. Those are 
conservative estimate figures - the total efficiency waste for the whole 
non-profit sector across all three royalty collectors, including web stream 
royalties, could easily mount up to as much as the entire annual Community Radio 
Fund!
 
The royalty bodies are really able to maintain their present position only 
because they have the financial backing to stand the legal costs that would be 
involved in arguing the case before a Copyright Tribunal (which is the legal 
arbiter on what the royalty collectors can do), so the small stations (and even 
not-so-small) are not in a financial position to challenge them.
 
It is legally open to the user of any copyright works to declare that they are 
not being offered a realistic licence by the collecting body, and to deem their 
own reasonable rate of payment pending an application to the Copyright Tribunal 
(that's simplified, but is the basic provision in law). But of course there are 
high stakes in that for an individual station, and most of us would be 
financially broken by a week's legal costs if awarded against us. 

 
Three years ago, after a year of negotiation was getting nowhere fast, we told 
one copyright body we were going to go down that route, but before we got to 
formal legal procedings they came up with a compromise offer that suited us 
reasonably well at the time. I suspect that despite the potential threat of 
legal costs, they equally knew that the case could have brought them adverse 
publicity and set a precedent for other stations.
 
PPL is well known for doing nothing to minimize the legal costs that are racked 
up. So much so that in one case in which their case was accepted, the Tribunal 
ordered them to pay the 'losing' parties' costs anyway because the Tribunal 
recognized that PPL had unreasonably racked up the legal costs by various 
tactics.
 
If the whole sector stood together with joint financing of an action, or the CMA 
performed that function with the formal backing of the sector, a case could be 
taken before the Tribunal and I think it would stand a high chance of winning, 
but of course the stakes are still high.
 
I would prefer to see CMA do for non-profit stations what the RadioCentre does 
for the (notionally)profit-making stations' MCPS payemnts. The RadioCentre pays 
MCPS a total figure for all its members, based on the total music usage across 
the board, and then passes on the costs to its members in strict proportion to 
their TSAs (it could possibly be done more fairly in proportion to income, but 
that would add a large admin overhead in cllating the figures). Doing this means 
that a very small community-based stations pay typically only £50-150 a year, 
while the big commercial stations pay a fair share.
 
This would destroy the royalty collectors' defence of their high minimum costs 
as they would now have the overhead of dealing with only one body for the 
majority of the sector. This would cost more than administering one station, 
since there would need to be some auditing checks etc, but the costs would be a 
tiny fraction of the costs they claim in administering several hundred stations 
individually, and the individual stations should on average see a several-fold 
reduction in their fees.
 
I think CMA should offer to take on this role, or if it is unwilling, they 
not-for-profit sector could set up its own aggregating body to handle this (and 
if successful, it could potentially develop to other things in future - such as 
group insurance schemes, or even advertising sales). CMA already has to do 
membership admin and could handle the PPL/PRS payments in the same as 
RadioCentre does with MCPS - simply adding the proportional charges to the 
annual renewal invoices, with automatically calculated amounts requiring little 
admin overhead. 

 
This should also benefit CMA and sector cohesion as stations would see a direct 
financial and admin benefit from CMA membership in addition to all the more 
nebulous lobbying and education work. In the case of RadiCentre, membership for 
smaller commercial stations is cost-negative because of the savings they make in 
MCPS fees by paying a proper proportional amount instead of an individual 
minimum fee-based amount.
 
That's my pennyworth, anyway (or potentially £1m pound's worth if our sector got 
its act together!)
 
Alex


      
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