AFEM: Play to Pay

New trade association on the block The Association for Electronic Music (AFEM) has launched ‘Get Played Get Paid’, a campaign aimed at ensuring that electronic music creators are properly paid.

This doesn’t include a task force swooping down on unscrupulous live promoters but rather focuses on remuneration for performance royalties from PRS and PPL– £100m of which is allegedly lost or incorrectly distributed due to incomplete or missing data across the genre each year.

AFEM CEO Mark Lawrence elaborated: “The problem is that the money collected does not necessarily go to the right people. Part of the problem is down to writers, artists and tracks not being registered at collection societies so the organisations don’t know who to pay, but even more significantly, most societies do not have accurate granular data on what is actually played in clubs”.

Of course, this is a problem across all genres and as is the case with many grievances, you can more or less blame it on Bono- unclaimed royalties are essentially redistributed to the highest earning members of collection societies such as U2 and Coldplay.

However, AFEM will bang the drum machine with societies on raising awareness of the importance of electronic artists and writers to register, alongside endorsing technology solutions that can improve the monitoring of which tracks are being played by DJs.

Find out more about AFEM here.