Digital Licensing Center Hits User and Revenue Benchmarks

Posted in News on March 5, 2007

BMI’s Digital Licensing Center (DLC), the music industry’s first fully automated end-to-end solution for licensing copyrights online, celebrated its sixth full year of operation in December. The DLC was created to make it easy for small webcasters to secure public performance rights online. The tool, which initially beta-launched in May 2000, was completely redesigned in 2004 with additional features.

DLC royalty revenues for 2006 were up 76% versus 2005, while nearly 200 new websites executed BMI licenses through the service in 2006. The DLC serves the performance licensing needs of nearly 500 small websites.

“It’s working… . The DLC has met its mandate to simplify music copyright licensing,” said Richard Conlon, BMI’s Vice President of New Media & Strategic Development. “Small websites need dedicated resources where they can license their properties and pay their public performance fees online. For BMI, the DLC performs the administrative tasks of licensing and revenue booking for small sites, enabling us to keep headcount down. We plan to raise the current revenue ceiling for eligible sites from the current $43,000 to more than $50,000 in the first quarter of 2007 to make the utility available to more sites.”

The system allows Internet sites to execute BMI licenses with one “Klik-thru” transaction, eliminating the need for paper contracting. Websites can visit the DLC and secure their BMI licenses 24 hours a day online. The service accepts electronic fee payments via credit card. All activity on the DLC reads over automatically into BMI’s billing and music-use tracking systems.

Since the relaunch in 2004, nearly 5,000 new media businesses have registered at the service to learn more about BMI’s copyright licensing solutions for webcasters. The service initially served small web properties generating less than $500 in annual fees for BMI. The Digital Licensing Center is located in the New Media section of BMI.com.

SOURCENews TAGS Licensing Digital Licensing Rights Management