Please read on for important information regarding the imminent commencement of Needletime payments, and what you need to do in order to share in these revenues.

BACKGROUND
SAMPRA (the South African Music Performance rights Association) has recently announced it will make its first distribution of Public Performance / Needletime royalties on April 30th 2009, and called on its Members to submit Repertoire Information to enable the correct disbursement of royalties to Owners. This distribution will be in respect of royalties that SAMPRA collected in 2008 from commercial users of sound recordings as background music.

After exhaustive negotiations with SAMPRA, SAMRO and others, AIRCO has agreed with SAMPRA a formal service agreement to licence and administer our Members’ Needletime rights. We believe this SAMPRA Agreement to be the best solution for AIRCO Members who wish to collect Needletime royalties, but are not / do not wish to become members of RISA (thereby disqualifying them from membership of SAMPRA).

For a comprehensive overview of how and why this agreement was reached, please refer to the AIRCO Broadcast Committee’s Annual Report (Feb 2009) [pdf]

DATA REQUESTED FROM YOU
Without accurate and up-to-date information about the repertoire which you own / exclusively control in South Africa, it is impossible for AIRCO / SAMPRA to accurately disburse any due Needletime royalties to you, from this or any future royalty distribution.

Please download the AIRCO Repertoire Information template.

It is imperative that you fill in this form as comprehensively as possible and return to us as soon as possible.

If you wish to be included in this first SAMPRA distribution, we need your repertoire list by no later than Thursday 19th March.

However, you do not have to worry that you will lose your entitlement to receive royalties for any particular track if the data for the track isn’t in the database by March 19th.

SAMPRA has advised that the money due for the use of that track will be transferred to a reserve fund and will be paid out once the data re that track has been received. It will be included in one of the supplementary distributions that will be done thereafter, in order to take account of additional data that is submitted on an ongoing basis.

Please supply as much information as possible on as much of your repertoire as possible.

However if it is not possible for you to submit information on ALL your repertoire by 19th March, SAMPRA has advised that you should focus first on tracks that were released in 2007 and 2008. These are the tracks that are most likely to have been used by their licensees in 2008 and are therefore the tracks that are most likely to have earned you royalties. SAMPRA suggests that you should start with these more recent tracks and then work backwards.

HOW TO FILL IN THE REPERTOIRE INFORMATION TEMPLATE
You will notice there are many fields in the spreadsheet which need to be completed for each track in your repertoire:

• For the purpose of this SAMPRA distribution, only the 3 fields marked in Red are required (the name of your company, the title of the track and the performer of the track and label information where this is different from the name of your company). These 3 fields are mandatory.
• For the purpose of general SAMPRA distributions in the future, all fields in Orange will be required. Filling in these fields is not mandatory, but strongly recommended.
• We have included a number of additional fields in Yellow which will be required in the event of (i) repertoire owners having to pay the performers share of needletime, and (ii) the future exploitation of sound recordings in the digital domain. Filling in these fields is not mandatory, but recommended.
• Comments have been included to describe the information and format required for each field.

Please be extra careful with all spelling, isrc codes etc – incorrect information can lead to delays or non-payment of due royalties.

We are excited that Needletime payments are almost a reality, and trust you will assist us in making the most of the opportunities for you.

For more information and any queries, please contact the AIRCO office.