Industry news
Mechanical rights licensing agency launched
The launch of mechanical rights licensing agency and NPO, CAPASSO (Composers Authors and Publishers Association), was announced at the 2014 Music Exchange in Cape Town on Saturday, 8 March.
CAPASSO, which is currently in the process of incorporation, is mandated to collect and distribute royalties to its members: music publishers and composers.
It will license the reproduction or reformatting of musical works and is authorised to issue such mechanical rights licences, collect the licence fees and distribute them as royalties back to the members.
SAMRO and NORM negotiate
The organisation came about as a result of extensive negotiations between SAMRO and NORM, with the vision to create a proactive, responsive and progressive mechanical rights licensing hub, which would represent all rightsholders and would play an integral role in the copyright licensing landscape on the African continent.
Supported by the Copyright Review Commission Report released by the DTI in 2012, which recommended one collecting society per right in South Africa, both SAMRO and NORM transferred their mechanical rights licensing operations to CAPASSO, and support the organisation’s strategic goals of service excellence to both members and users, and comprehensive licensing in the digital era.
For more information, go to www.capasso.co.za.
