Music Publishing News Roundup: Pandora + Music Reports • SOCAN + SACEM • Publishers Settle With 2 Major Labels

Pandora has announced a partnership with rights administration platform, Music Reports, to manage the mechanical licensing and royalty administration for its upcoming on-demand streaming service. The deal comes on the heels of two $150m+ class action lawsuits filed against Spotify over missing or inaccurate mechanical royalty payments to songwriters.

Pandora says Music Reports’ licensing opt-in platform will “give music publishers greater insight into and control over how their catalog of musical works is being enjoyed, and offer consistent rates across the industry.”

SOCAN, the Society of Composer Authors & Music Publishers of Canada, and French authors’ rights society SACEM have announced an agreement to participate in large pan-European deals with digital service providers. The partnership entrusts SACEM to represent the European licensing and sales processing for SOCAN as a single point of collection across the continent. SOCAN CEO Eric Baptiste said, "this agreement means that SOCAN's more than 135,000 members will benefit greatly from further improved tracking of royalties in the burgeoning European music market.”

David Israelite announced that music publishers have reached a settlement on mechanical licenses with two of the three majors, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, at the National Music Publishers Association convention. While details of the agreement were not disclosed, Billboard reports that, if approved by the CRB, it will keep mechanical rates for track downloads and CDs flat at the current rate of 9.1 cents per song. Another part of the settlement involves the two majors agreeing to sit out of the rate-setting process for streaming services.