Imagesound Americas maintains the required licenses and permissions from
the owners of the music and media it provides. Complete licensing coverage
for the music that we provide and consultation for other client music usages
is an important part of the service we provide and we’re committed to
being completely compliant. Our knowledge and expertise of formal licensing
requirements also enable us to assist clients with
customized branded products.
The provision of music and video requires complying with three different
types of licensing:
The master rights of a recording
Typically paid directly to a record label or to a collecting rights
organization, such as
AVLA
in Canada.
Imagesound Americas has proactively formed relationships with hundreds
of individual record labels and publishers to use sound recordings for
public performance in commercial establishments through loudspeakers as
background and foreground music. We provide labels with quarterly reports
pertaining to subscribers, sound recordings, revenue and other required
details.
Mechanical rights of a recording
The Harry Fox Agency is the foremost mechanical licensing, collection
and distribution agency for music publishers in the U.S. With its current
level of publisher representation, HFA licenses the largest percentage of
the mechanical and digital uses of music in the United States on CDs,
digital services, records, tapes and imported phonorecords. Imagesound
Americas has a blanket agreement with Harry Fox for their publisher
representation. When tracks are used by artists that are not represented
by Harry Fox, individual agreements are made with publishers / songwriters
to ensure compliance.
The public performance rights
Paid to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC in the USA and SOCAN in Canada.
Imagesound Americas registers all of its sites with the three US PROs
– ASCAP, BMI and SESAC – this covers the public performance liability for
all of the music that we provide to clients.
ASCAP, BMI and SESAC are distinct organisations that monitor different
groups and rights, as such, each is required to be compensated separately
in accordance with the law. They protect their members’ musical copyrights
by monitoring public performances of their music and compensating them
accordingly.
- The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers
(ASCAP) are the oldest performing rights society, claiming over 300,000
songwriters, composers and music publishers as members.
- Broadcast Music, Incorporated (BMI) tracks public performances
for 6.5 million works and collects and distributes licensing revenues for
those performances as royalties to over 350,000 songwriters, composers
and music publishers it represents, and thousands of creators around
the world who have chosen BMI for representation in the U.S.
- Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC) is the
smallest but the fastest growing of the three performance rights
organizations in the United States.