Attention, everyone. EMI wants YOUR money. In fact, they want it SO BADLY that they’re prepared to even go the extra mile and make it a little bit easier for you to give it to them. As Digital Music News reports, EMI’s publishing group has decided to “consolidate digital rights on a substantive portion of its catalog, particularly digital performance rights as currently handled by ASCAP.” Basically, what this means is that, for some 200,000+ songs in the EMI-April Music catalog, you don’t need to call up ASCAP and compliment it on its weight loss and great haircut in order to secure performance rights after you’ve already chatted up EMI for the synch rights and mechanical rights to a piece of EMI-published music. Even more basically put, now you only have to suck one dick instead of two. (Again, note that this is for digital performance rights only; non-digital outlets, e.g., when your loser friend’s band covers “Creep” in that college-town bar, will still be handled by ASCAP.)
“By bringing these rights back together our aim is to reduce the burden of licensing, to create greater efficiency and importantly to reduce the barriers to the development of innovative new services,” EMI Music Publishing Chairman & CEO Roger Faxon relayed. “That absolutely has to be in the interest of everybody involved in the process — songwriters, licensees and consumers alike.” It’s interesting to note, however, that this ‘make everyone happy’ plan to generate new licensing income for the lumbering music giant only narrowly defeated the runner-up plan of holding a gun to Paul McCartney’s head and demanding that everyone just stop using the internet for things.
• EMI-April Music Publishing: http://www.emimusicpub.com
