Community radio, SBS radio, narrowcast radio, Māori, student, access and low power FM
APRA AMCOS collects licence fees from Australian community, SBS and narrowcast radio stations and New Zealand Māori, Student, Access and Low Power FM stations. In total there are around 270 community radio stations, 100 narrowcast radio stations and 130 Māori, student, access and low power FM stations.
Licence fees from commercial and national radio stations in Australia and New Zealand are collected and distributed separately.
Because of the nature of these services, overall licence fees are relatively low. It is not cost effective for APRA AMCOS (and oftentimes the radio station) to collect and process direct census data listing every song broadcast on their station. APRA AMCOS therefore makes royalty distributions using sample and analogous data for community radio and analogous data for narrowcast radio and low-power FM.
Australian Community Radio:
APRA uses three separate sources of sample data for community radio.
For songs used in sponsorship announcements and community service announcements, 4.35% of the total revenue from community radio stations is allocated on an analogous basis to the Australian commercial radio pool for music in advertisements.
SBS:
SBS provide us with detailed electronic reports of the songs they broadcast across their radio stations on a full census basis. In some instances a sample data set is provided.
Very few advertisements are broadcast on SBS radio, therefore this information is not captured. Members are encouraged to contact APRA AMCOS as and when they are made aware of their music being broadcast on SBS Radio as part of an advertisement, community service announcement or news and weather themes.
Australian Narrowcast Radio and New Zealand Māori, Student, Access and Low-Power FM:
Narrowcast radio and Low-Power FM (which are essentially the same type of broadcast service) is handled differently. APRA and AMCOS licence fees (where relevant) are added to the Australian/NZ commercial radio pool as appropriate, apart from identified foreign language narrowcast radio stations in Australia where their royalties are added to the community radio pool.
New Zealand Māori stations and student access radio stations provide a sample data set.
AMCOS Royalties:
The very small AMCOS portion of licence fees from these services is distributed using the same information as is provided to APRA.
The songs reported in the sample data are matched to the vast repertoire of songs in our database. Analogous distributions are added to the relevant distribution pool, where matching has already occurred.
For the SBS data we receive for foreign language broadcasts, where the corresponding territory has copyright laws in place and an affiliated performing right society established, 25% of the information is analysed (1 week out of 4 weeks of data per month) due to the manual nature of this work.
Community radio stations are split into four separate pools: General, Christian, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander and Christian Rhema, to ensure that distributions are as accurate as possible. For example, the licence fees paid by Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander radio stations are distributed directly to the copyright owners of the songs being broadcast by those stations.
There is an imperfect match between APRA’s invoice timing and cycle for community radio and the provision of sample data from stations and third-party sources. As a result, APRA strikes a ‘fixed point value’ (FPV) for broadcast on community radio to provide consistency in distributions to members. The FPV is derived from an estimation of royalties and broadcasts across the financial year, with any variation from actual reconciled into the following year. The FPV, where durations are provided by stations) is varied according to APRA’s long work schedule for radio broadcasts (see Commercial Radio Guide for more detail)
This rate is then multiplied by the number of points given to a song, resulting in the royalty amount payable for that song. Music used in sponsorship announcements, community service announcements and news and weather themes receive 50% of the FPV of regular songs that are played on the radio per point.
Once we have calculated the amount payable for a song, we can pay that amount to the copyright owner of the work. If the copyright owner is not a direct member of APRA or AMCOS but is a member of an affiliated overseas society we pay that society.
Licence fees are added to pools as described above and distributed using the same points calculation method as for other blanket distributions.
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.
Analogous:
Royalties are distributed via distribution pools (or by copying datasets) that are most similar in terms of a licensee’s music content. This method is used when Direct Allocation or Sample reporting is impractical.
Sample:
royalties are distributed via a representative sample of performances (which may be in relation to a particular licence scheme, licence scheme or group thereof), where it is inappropriate, unfeasible, or not economically viable to provide a Direct Allocation.
This fact sheet is a guide only. Refer to our full Distribution Rules and Practices for more information.