Learn how music rights and licensing operate across territories, including international copyright considerations, collection societies, reciprocal agreements, and territorial rights.

Outcome. Understand how your rights travel, and who collects for you in a country you have never visited.

Copyright is territorial. Your work is protected in other countries through international agreements, but the term, the exceptions and the available remedies are set by each country’s own law.

Collection societies operate nationally and have reciprocal agreements with one another, which is how a performance in one country can reach a writer in another. Those agreements are why affiliating with one PRO gives you worldwide reach in principle, and why the money arrives late and reduced in practice.

Neighboring rights exist in many countries and pay performers and recording owners for broadcast and public performance of the recording. The United States does not have a general equivalent for terrestrial radio, which is why artists are often owed money abroad that they never think to claim.

Territory is a negotiable term in every licence. Worldwide in perpetuity should cost considerably more than one territory for one year, and agreeing the former by default is one of the most common ways value is given away.

What you will produce

A territory map for your catalog showing who collects what, where, and what is currently uncollected.