Recommendation 9

The licensing and royalty chains of song rights causes considerable confusion and complexity to the system, and songwriters and composers pay the price. There is no single solution to create more efficient and timely royalty chains but the Government can work with industry to facilitate this. The Government should require all publishers and collecting societies to publish royalty chain information to provide transparency to creators about how much money is flowing through the system and where problems are arising. This should be done periodically, and in a way that is practical and useful to other stakeholders, including other collecting societies and publishers. It should also require publishers and collecting societies to put in place efficient, practical alert systems to inform creators and representatives about data Economics of music streaming 105 conflicts. Finally, the Government should leverage the size of the UK market to explore how global licensing deals could be made possible by policymakers around the world, including in trade deals, which would support creators both domestically and abroad. (Paragraph 97) The market for music rights