A background music supplier is a company that creates and supplies curated music playlists and tailors them to a business type and specific premises. APRA AMCOS collects licence fees from background music suppliers in Australia and New Zealand. Background music is used by a large variety of APRA’s general background music licence holders (e.g. retail, salons, health practitioners).
APRA undertakes a direct allocation of each background music supplier’s licence fees against the detailed reports they provide to us. The list of licensed Background Music Suppliers in this category currently includes:
Retail locations and hospitality businesses who are clients of Background Music Suppliers include: Coles, Woolworths Group, Dan Murphy’s, IGA, Officeworks and Bank of New Zealand.
The reports provided to us by the background music suppliers listed above are directly matched to the vast repertoire of songs in our database.
For licence fees collected from the background music suppliers listed above, the revenue is distributed as royalties according to direct allocation method. We use a ‘points’ system to allocate royalties to each song. We allocate one point per 15 seconds of duration for each song, with a standard rate paid for songs with a duration between 1 and 6 minutes. The background music suppliers provide song durations within the specific music use reports.
For the remainder of the background music suppliers’ licence fees, 50% of the revenue is added to the commercial radio revenue distribution pool, and 50% is distributed via proxy data obtained from Spotify and Apple Music.
In curating music playlists for their clients, background music suppliers also copy or reproduce music. AMCOS licenses the reproduction of this music. Background music suppliers supply us with details of the songs that have been copied so that we can distribute the AMCOS portion of the licence fee to the relevant copyright owners. Where background music suppliers don’t supply this information, their fees are combined with background music suppliers with similar music libraries.
Distributions for these businesses are calculated and paid according to the distribution pools that the revenue is allocated to.
View our information guide on Unidentified Songs and Disputes for more information.
Songs:
The Copyright Act refers to compositions, musical scores in the form of sheet music, broadsheets or other notation as musical works. Lyrics or words to a song are considered literary works. When we refer to songs, we are referring to all the elements of a musical/literary work protected by copyright.
Census analysis:
APRA AMCOS receives data for 100% of a licensee’s music use and includes all data in its distributions.
Direct allocation - blanket:
licence fees from an individual licensee or a small group of closely connected licensees (e.g. network television stations) are distributed, usually on a census analysis basis, to the music used and reported to APRA AMCOS by the licensee. Individual distribution values are calculated from a single revenue pool based on frequency of use, duration, type of use etc.
Direct allocation – transactional:
as per ‘direct allocation – blanket’, but each song carries a discrete distribution value based on the number of sales/usages it has received during the reporting period, as reported to APRA AMCOS by the licensee.
Analogy:
licence fees are added to one or more existing distribution pools that are most similar in terms of their music content.
This fact sheet is a guide only. Refer to our full Distribution Rules and Practices for more information.