IPRS Unveils Members Self-Serve Portal for Greater Transparency

by  EVENTFAQS Bureau Industry Watch | August 26, 2020 | News

IPRS

The Indian Performing Right Society Limited (IPRS) has launched a self-serve portal for its members, through which they can edit personal information, access their list of works, request modifications, submit new registrations, view royalty tracking and history of royalty payments.

The launch is part of the implementation of what IPRS bills as the ‘world’s most advanced operating system for copyright societies’.

The Indian society representing authors, composers and publishers of music said it has made ‘considerable investment’ in this move to ‘IPRS 2.0,’ using technology developed by Canada’s Dataclef. The intent is “to provide the highest level of transparency for members and licensees. With an authoritative database of millions of musical works and unlimited scalable processing capacity, this robust system will provide the best-in-class monetisation capacity for the Society's members,” informed an official statement.      

Javed Akhtar, Chairman, IPRS, said, “The world as we know it is evolving at a furious pace and our music industry is no different. IPRS 2.0 is a momentous step forward in keeping pace with the changing times and bringing about positive change in our members’ lives. Our focus is clear and two-fold; on the one hand we want to bring in greater transparency. On the other hand, we want to leave no stone unturned and leverage every opportunity to ensure our members can reap all benefits possible of their hard work and creative acumen.” 

Rakesh Nigam, CEO, IPRS, said “The new portal will bring in a high level of transparency into our operations where our members can view and check their repertoire at their own convenience. This will help eradicate obvious errors that occur due to bad data, wrong IPs, duplicate submissions, etc. We are confident that with the new technology deployment, we can overcome these challenges and offer better value to our members.”

He added that IPRS 2.0 also manifests in the numerous strategic alliances that the society has recently signed with social media channels and OTT platforms like YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music, Facebook, ALT Balaji and Ola, opening new revenue channels for members.

Jeff King, CEO, Dataclef, noted that India is an expanding market with great potential for the music industry, supported by a strong collective society (IPRS).

IPRS also revealed that it has distributed royalties of Rs.60 crore (USD 8M) to members since the commencement of the lockdown in April 2020 and set up an emergency relief fund of nearly Rs. 4 crore (USD 535,000) for members impacted by the pandemic.