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Reciprocal Representation Agreements with Foreign Performing Rights Societies

If you’re a songwriter or composer and have written songs that have the potential to be used on radio, television, the Internet, in restaurants and or any of the thousands of other businesses that use music, you need performing right representation, which will ensure that you get paid when any of those businesses plays your song.

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“Every time one of our songs is performed, we get paid for it. It doesn’t make a difference who does it or how, the cash comes to us. Most artists now understand that we can be a good way of making extra money. The artist has a right to say they don’t want their song being featured in an advert or sung by a doll and we’ll honour that, but it’s not the Bible we’re writing here.”

Record companies may swing in and out of favour, depending on who their hottest acts are, but radio stations keep playing classic tracks no matter who the owner of the intellectual property is. Each time a record is played, EMI takes a fee.

A few years ago he turned down a request from a health care group to license the music for Over There, a patriotic rallying cry for American forces in the first world war. The company wanted to rename the tune Under Here with reworked lyrics persuading women to use their brand of underarm deodorant. “We were offered a gargantuan sum of money but sometimes you just have to say no,” he says. “This is one of America’s most important anthems.”

The 60-year-old former lawyer is explaining how synchronisation - the business of selling songs to be used in films, advertising or even funeral videos - has become the fastest growing part of the music publishing business and supported the profits of a British institution through one of the darkest periods in its history.

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Music publishing has traditionally been an underappreciated segment of the music industry: Music publishers make their money by buying and then administering the rights to use the underlying compositions and lyrics that make up individual songs. That’s decidedly less glamorous than selling the actual recordings themselves, but in recent years publishing has been the only consistent moneymaker in the industry. Even while consumers stopped buying compact discs, publishing revenues continued to grow, fueled by a wide variety of revenue streams.In the 2006 fiscal year ended March 31, Bandier’s group earned about $200 million on sales of approximately $800 million, up 5.5% and 2.6%, respectively, from the previous year.

During his 17 years at EMI, Bandier built the company into the industry’s largest holder of song catalogs. Music publishing, which involves administering the rights to song compositions, is an increasingly vital business for major record labels because it is consistently profitable at a time when music sales have been eroding.

commercials increasingly are doubling as powerful promotional tools for bands and labels whose music might otherwise be ignored.