Iceland’s neighbouring rights collective SFH signs five-year deal with music licensing company PPL – Music Business Worldwide

SFH, Iceland’s neighbouring rights collective management organisation for performers and recording rightsholders, has signed a five-year deal for PPL’s Business Services offer.

The deal will see UK-based music licensing company PPL support SFH with the distribution of royalties to performers and recording rightsholders based outside of Iceland, and will increase the amount of money distributed by SFH, says PPL.

SFH will continue to manage domestic royalty distributions.

PPL’s Business Services allows other CMOs to use the company’s technology to distribute royalties accurately and in full.

SFH will send its airplay data to PPL, which will then identify the performers and recording rightsholders to pay by matching this data against recordings in its database.

According to PPL, analysis of SFH’s airplay data shows that 97% of recordings played can be auto-matched to a corresponding track in PPL’s database, with a further 2% having one or more corresponding tracks to manually match to.

The first distribution of international monies to performers and recording rightsholders using PPL’s Business Services will take place in May, and will see three years’ worth of collected royalties distributed.

PPL will then continue to support international royalty distributions for the next five years.

PPL’s Business Services also supports the royalty distributions of five other CMOs: AGATA in Lithuania, Audiogest in Portugal, EFÜ in Estonia, PPI in Ireland and SWISSPERFORM in Switzerland.

In 2020, says PPL, the collective collected £225.7 million across all of its revenue streams, while also distributing money to over 135,000 performers and recording rightsholders. 

In 2021, the company collected a record £94m (approx $128m) of international monies, up 9.4% on 2020.

“Everyone benefits from this deal.”

Peter Leathem, PPL

Peter Leathem, Chief Executive Officer at PPL, said: “I am very happy that SFH have chosen PPL’s Business Services to support the distribution of royalties to performers and recording rightsholders outside of Iceland.

“International royalty distributions can be difficult for smaller scale CMOs because of the costs and complexities of building the systems and databases required to distribute monies effectively.

“For a fraction of the cost of such an investment, SFH can use PPL’s existing market-leading technology and repertoire database, allowing it to accurately distribute money in full to performers and recording rightsholder around the world.

“Everyone benefits from this deal – the artists and labels who will receive fair royalty payment, and SFH, whose operations will be streamlined and improved.”

“It is our aim at SFH to ensure we collect and distribute as much money as possible.”

Gunnar Guðmundsson, SFH

Gunnar Guðmundsson, Managing Director at SFH, added: “It is our aim at SFH to ensure we collect and distribute as much money as possible for the performers and recording rightsholders whose recordings are played in public in Iceland.

“By using PPL’s Business Services offer, we can do this cheaply and effectively.

“This not only leaves more money on the table to be distributed but also means more performers and recording rightsholders will be paid.

“We look forward to working closely with PPL and continuing to deliver a cutting-edge royalty collection and distribution service.”Music Business Worldwide