Blink announces alternative to APRA


If you read Blink's e-book The Problem With Music in New Zealand & How To Fix It (covered in a post over here), you'll have heard his thoughts on the work that APRA does collecting songwriting royalties for New Zealand artists. Without going into detail, his argument is that the performing rights organisation perhaps doesn't do the most rigorous job of ensuring that their collected royalties are paid out to the appropriate songwriters. The e-book is well worth a read.

Now he's backed that up by announcing the planned launch of an APRA alternative called PROPS, which stands for Performance Royalty Open Payments system. One of APRA's roles is collecting royalties from live venues to then theoretically pay onwards to the appropriate registered songwriters. From the sounds of things, PROPS is designed to fill that role, but would pay bands twice the amount of money and within 7-14 days.

"In a few months I’ll have an outline of how PROPS works on my website and how anybody can employ the system for themselves. It is not meant to be a system to replace payments for background music at this point, only live performances. I doubt APRA would see this as legit, but, it would be very funny to see them complain about a system that does their job significantly better than they do. Music users shouldn’t pay APRA if they can show they can do a better job distributing the money themselves. I’ve been paying fees for years and believe in paying these fees, my beef is not about the idea of paying fees, it’s just I just wanna make sure they go to the right people."


Watch this space. 

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