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Indrani Dutta

Kolkata Nov. 14

TELECOM companies have just discovered that playing music or offering it as value-addition to brighten up the bouquet of mobile telephony services demandsits price.

Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL), a copyright protection society for sound recordings, has entered into licensing agreements with two mobile phone companies. Idea Cellular and BPL had paid up the requisite fees, Mr V. Pradhan, CEO of PPL, said.

The fees include a fixed annual licence fee of Rs 5 lakh per circle plus a fee for usage charges.

"Negotiations are on with other companies such as Orange and AirTel and we plan to bring within our coverage all companies which are using music dedication services like offering music clips for SMS", he said.

For offering music downloads for ring tones, the mobile phone companies have begun paying fees to the Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS) - which is the licensing authority for performing artists such as lyricists, composers and music publishers. IPRS will be collecting the fees from the application service companies, which supply the tones to the telecom companies.

Assigning ringback tones - a service, which is not now available in India — will also attract similar payments, Mr Pradhan said.

According to the Copyright Act, 1957 all those who play pre-recorded music in any form in a public place have to take a licence from PPL. PPL's member companies, which include Saregama, Tips, Sony and Virgin have assigned their performance rights to PPL and get 85 per cent of the revenues that PPL generates annually. The remaining is retained by PPL, which is a self-financing organisation.

He said that licensing of telecast rights for music along with and broadcast rights were set to become two major revenue streams for PPL.

"Over 30 per cent of PPL revenues are now accounted for by the radio stations (both government and private) and the coming into being of about 22 new FM stations have boosted PPL's kitty".

Unwilling to get into numbers, he said that the organisation had registered a 90 per cent growth in its turnover in 2002-03 over the previous year (this was mainly on account of rationalisation of fees as also increasing the coverage to more organisations). It was poised for another 60 per cent jump in the current fiscal.

PPL, which administers the broadcast, telecast and public performance rights on behalf of its 60-plus members, was given further teeth in 1996 when it was given certificate of registration by the Union Human Resources Development Ministry, giving it the right to commence and carry on its business of protecting the copyright of its members companies in respect of sound recordings.

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