Business News Deals Labels & Publishers

Ole signs up with AMRA

By | Published on Friday 3 February 2017

Ole

Kobalt’s very own collecting society AMRA yesterday confirmed a deal with Ole, which is, we’ll have you’ll know – well, they’ll have you know really, but whatever – either way, we’re (possibly) talking about “the world’s fastest-growing independent rights management company” here.

As previously reported, Kobalt acquired and then relaunched AMRA in 2015, in a bid to create a new collecting society specifically designed for licensing song rights to digital services in multiple territories, while utilising its parent company’s much hyped data management and reporting tools.

It was an evolution of the various collaborations that were struck up between the big music publishers and different European collecting societies after the former decided that they wanted to do direct deals with digital services over the mechanical rights in their Anglo-American repertoires – rather than leaving such deal-making to the collecting societies.

The publisher/society collaborations were necessary because the streaming services also need to exploit the performing rights in the same songs, and these are controlled by the societies not the publishers (outside the US, on an exclusive basis). It also makes sense to pool the processing of data and royalties once the deals are done. The result has been various new partnerships and, arguably, a new kind of business relationship between music publishers and the big European societies.

AMRA immediately became Kobalt’s partner in this domain – taking over from Swedish society STIM – but it also sought to provide similar services to other publishers. Hence the deal with Ole under which AMRA will now license both performing and mechanical rights of some of the music firm’s catalogues to digital services in multiple though not all territories.

The deal, the two partners say, “will allow Ole and AMRA to collaborate on licensing and data acuity in the digital space leveraging their respective proprietary technology platforms”. And doesn’t that sound like fun?

“We are THRILLED to have Ole partnering with AMRA”, says the society’s CEO Tomas Ericsson. “Ole is one of the most innovative music companies out there with a very strong client roster that will now be able to benefit from AMRA’s new centralised collections model. Ole is a technology-driven company that matches our values on transparency, accuracy and speed of accounting and we look forward to working with Robert and his team in the coming years”.

Who’s Robert you wonder? Well, Ole CEO Robert Ott of course! Want do know what he thinks of the deal? No? Good, because here’s Ole’s SVP Finance & Administration Chris Giansante with a quote instead: “Ole is pleased to be working with AMRA’s strong platform for the benefit of our clients in the international digital space. Working alongside Tomas and his team, we’re confident that Ole’s global collections will increase, benefitting our stakeholders in 2017 and beyond”.



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