Public Performance Royalty King
As much as music provides a generation with a cultural voice, reflection and/or emotional amour, for the people creating the work and investing in it, it is business. A business that has seen it's life grant through a generational copyright growth.
Communication to the public, which is the right that permits mass consumption from a singular platform has been center to the music business for a long time. Known commonly as a public performance, massively collected from users through Collective Management Organizations (CMO).
Radio, (whether am/fm, satellite, internet) is one of the longest standing user and revenue contributor to the music industry.
In South Africa there are three CMO's that collect this particular right from radio - SAMRO on behalf of authors, arrangers, composers, and publishers - SAMPRA & AIRCO on behalf of artists, featured artists, session musicians, and phonographic producers (mostly referred to record companies). All of these CMO's are interested in collecting money from radio stations based on their revenue earnings, and paid on the basis of a ratio that is agreed upon with the rights owners, with songs being accounted for on a cue sheet.
It is deemed essential as a product owner in the music industry for you to get your music on radio. Whether your goal is to be played in order to secure gigs, endorsements and/or increase your sales in a form of sync, streaming or any other innovative ways your business development might see fit.
As much as internet has opened a new way to market to an audience, radio still attracts much more effort to really realize return. That effort has to attract returns, for the publishers, composer/songwriter that is the most essential earning model in this parts of the world. Even thou communication to the public for streaming services has been granted, the foundation of royalty collection for digital platforms have been so skewed that the earnings for an individual songwriter/composer and small catalog publisher is going to suffocate, when radio earnings suddenly drop. For now the radio industry still feeds the music industry a reasonable amount to impact the lives of the minority shareholder/member in the CMO.
So it was a great exercise to actually look at the top radio stations in the country and see who pays the most. According to the numbers the station that is most listened to is Ukhozi fm (7 million listeners) . If you get your song on there for high rotation you could deem yourself in a position to impact airplay on a lot more stations. However, it is not going to be the highest paying station to yield results for performance rights. It is a station owned by South Africa's public broadcaster which has experienced financial difficulties and has been reported to owe the music industry in the millions of dollars not rands. You can therefore wonder what kind of a station pays well.
The station that yields more income for the music industry is one that attracts more advertising revenue, because it is a music format station it owes its success to its programming of music that has their listners glued, and more than anything the profile of their listener. The advertising industry, whether direct and/or through their media buyers they spend most of their money on the Johannesburg based radio station, 947 (940 thousand listeners). This has over the years kept 947, formerly known as Highveld, be the Public Performance Radio King.
