PROs that let you decide which tracks you register with them?

[naudio]

Hi guys!

I was wondering that is there any PRO that lets you decide which tracks you register with them?

I am a member of TEOSTO (Finnish PRO) and they’ve pretty strict rules. I just landed a well paid game music gig from a Finnish game company. However, the publisher and the game company have had bad experiences working with composer that are members of TEOSTO. There has been some lawsuits etc. As a member of TEOSTO, you are required to register ALL your music with TEOSTO. The game publisher and the game company want to have a “buy-out deal”: meaning that they will pay a nice amount of money upfront and after that they have full rights to use the music. Because of TEOSTO, I can’t do that kind of deal.

They told me that most of Finnish game house don’t like to work with composer that are affiliated with TEOSTO. Most of my income from library music is just RF sync licences,
but I’m trying to get better placements in better libraries in the future. So I need to be affiliated with a PRO in the future to collect the possible backend.I just seems that working with my local PRO in this case doesn’t work.

Anybody got any ideas?

[Michael Nickolas]

ASCAP certainly lets you decide which tracks to register. But I was curious about your post and took a quick look on the TEOSTO website and saw this:

“Teosto’s membership agreement for music authors covers all the compositions, lyrics and arrangements of an author. However, Teosto wants to increase music authors’ freedom of choice through self-administration. In practice, this means that authors can administer the rights to their works themselves in some cases.

Game music is one of the areas subject to music authors’ self-administration.”

[naudio]

You are certainly true. But even with that self-admistration, TEOSTO still collects performance royalties. Which would be problematic in this case.

They are actually rolling out a new self-adminstration system soon; in that new system you can also choose to self-administrate performance royalties. However, like I said earlier, TEOSTO has a bad reputation in Finnish game industry and even after that reform, I could lose some gigs because of TEOSTO. That’s why I am looking for other PROs and alternatives.

Thanks for the tip, I’ll take look at ASCAP.

[Author]

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