Music produced by artists for licensing and royalty collection via non traditional (performing rights societies) routes was not easy to come by over 15 years ago when we started. All artists had decided that by signing up to their national PRO would provide them with an additional revenue stream. However the reality has been these artists never gained much income but became locked into agreements that restricted where else they could license their music.

In recent years artists have decided that the PROs only pay out to the major record labels for background music because quite simply the PROs have little idea what tracks businesses play.

Alternative “royalty free music” or (badly described as) “copyright free” (which it certainly isn’t) service providers can offer non-exclusive agreements that enable the artist full control of their music by being able to sign up to other non-exclusive service providers.

This also disrupts the traditional music label industry because when an artist signs up to a label, the label will take part ownership of the rights and so restrict what the artist can do. Of course the artist may choose this route on a promise of a powerful marketing team who can generate more profile and thus more revenue from sales and plays but the reality is often very different and ties an artist into an agreement for a number of years or at worse they never regain full ownership of their music.

Melody Pods offers a non-exclusive music agreement to allow us to use artist’s compositions and musical works for use in businesses as background music only, internationally. Thus the artist knows for what use they are agreeing we license their music for so they can then focus on other markets to gain other partner agreements and therefore build their revenue streams from the same music catalogue.

Artificial Intelligence.

We can not guarantee that our artist have used any AI software in the production of their music. AI systems are included in a wide range of music software nowadays and will increasingly be used to speed up the music production workflow. Therefore we accept that AI might have had some contribution to the music we supply but we are clear on ownership of the composition and musical works and ensured we have tight contractual agreements with our artists that back off the liability of the copyright of their music to them if at any time there is some form of contention around the originality or likeness of one or more of their pieces of work. We also run our own checking procedure to check for any tracks that are too much like known compositions and performed works.