12 January 2006

Why Music Can Be Hazardous for Your Blog's Health

Jan 12, 2006
Music on your blog? You may need to license it
Website owners could pay from $1,000 to $10,000 a year based on number of songs
By Serene Luo

BLOGGERS and personal website owners may soon be pressed to license the background music that they have on their online journals or websites.

This was announced by Dr Edmund Lam, chief executive and director of the Composers and Authors Society of Singapore (Compass), yesterday. He was launching Compass' one-stop centre which will make licensing musical works for digital distribution easier.

'We increasingly see more bloggers who upload music onto their webpages,' he said.

'We want to encourage them to come forward to our one-stop centre to get licensed, for a reasonable fee.'

For websites where the song cannot be downloaded or have any advertising, owners have to pay $1,000 a year for playing 10 songs or fewer, $5,000 for playing 11 to 49 songs and $10,000 for over 50 songs.

This is a 'competitive rate', said Mr Melvin Tan, the licensing manager of Compass, which protects the interests of composers and lyricists, and administers royalties to them.

Under the law, royalties must be paid on music put on websites too, even if it is a blog.

While it has not yet sued anyone, Compass will start 'massive educational efforts' soon, said Dr Lam.

7 comments:

Elia Diodati said...

Too bad the Podsafe Music Network doesn't stock Asian pop. Not much, anyway.

Beach-yi said...

Huh, can they do that? What the hell..

Anonymous said...

it's pretty irritating to have background music anyway...

Let's Ban Them, shall we? :P

lbandit said...

Wa... "massive educational efforts". It sounds scary : (

Gilbert Koh aka Mr Wang said...

Hey Bandit

I see you've closed your blog down. Pity, I thought we had some interesting discussions there ...

Anthony said...

This is ridiculous, and an offshot for having undeveloped fair use rights in Singapore.

lbandit said...

Oh well.. i thought i'll take a break. Probably start another one with another url some time later : D