Tuesday 15th December 2020
BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) is partnering with ICE to license portions of its repertoire to digital
music services operating across Europe.
While much of BMI’s award-winning repertoire has been available on a multi-territorial basis to
pan-European digital music services for many years through initiatives to match these rights to
multi-territorial mechanical rights, some works, commonly known in the European market as
“reciprocal repertoire,” have still been licensed and administered on a territory-by-territory basis
by local societies.
This new partnership fills the gap by making the remaining musical works from BMI’s repertoire
available to Pan-European digital service providers in one central hub through the ICE Core.
“BMI continues to applaud the invaluable work that the local CMOs perform every day for our
songwriters, composers and music publishers, and we also appreciate the challenge that digital
music services face in securing rights for their services across Europe,” said Ann Sweeney, Senior
Vice President, International & Global Policy, BMI. “This new collaboration with ICE helps to meet
that challenge by providing an efficient one-stop-shop to the European DSPs and supports our
continued effort to serve BMI’s music creators when their creative works are performed digitally
in Europe.”
“We’re delighted to welcome BMI to the ICE Core,” commented Ben McEwen, VP Commercial,
ICE. “At this time, it’s more critical than ever that rightsholders have the best online licensing
representation, with the expertise and shared resources to really address the market on their
behalf, and we believe that ICE can provide that for BMI.”
Thorsten Sauer, CEO, ICE, added, “We are grateful for the partnership with BMI and the
opportunity to represent some of their songwriters, composers and music publishers. We are
looking forward to support BMI and their members with ICE’s end to end services from copyright
to processing and licensing. As ever, our response is working even harder for each and every
rightsholder, big or small.”
The ICE Core licence:
Launched in 2016, the ICE Core licence brings together the work of members from GEMA, STIM,
PRS for Music, Concord, Downtown, Peer music, IMRO and now BMI. ICE has a nine-strong
licensing team, including dedicated resource focusing on data analysis and insight to ensure we
are delivering ‘best in class’ commercial outcomes and market data for our growing customer
base. Licensed to more than 50 services, across a scope of more than 130 territories it’s a key
component for today’s DSPs.
About ICE
ICE offers a flexible suite of services for publishers, Collective Management Organisations (CMOs)
and rightsholders. Services include: copyright administration, multi-territorial online licensing
processing and Digital Service Provider (DSP) licensing solutions. ICE was created by PRS, STIM
and GEMA and represents over 330,000 rightsholders alone through this partnership. In addition,
the ICE Core includes repertoire of IMRO and the independent publishers Peermusic,
Downtown/Songtrust and Concord. ICE has processed trillions of online music uses from music
streaming services and paid over €1.6 billion back to rightsholders since March 2016. The ICE
copyright database holds over 40 million musical works. ICE is based in the UK, Germany and
Sweden.
ABOUT BMI:
Celebrating over 80 years of service to songwriters, composers, music publishers and
businesses, Broadcast Music, Inc.® (BMI®) is a global leader in music rights management,
serving as an advocate for the value of music. BMI represents the public performance rights in
over 17 million musical works created and owned by more than 1.1 million songwriters,
composers, and music publishers. The Company negotiates music license agreements and
distributes the fees it generates as royalties to its affiliated writers and publishers when their
songs are performed in public. In 1939, BMI created a groundbreaking open-door policy
becoming the only performing rights organization to welcome and represent the creators of
blues, jazz, country, and American roots music. Today, the musical compositions in BMI’s
repertoire, from chart toppers to perennial favorites, span all genres of music and are
consistently among the most-performed hits of the year. For additional information and the
latest BMI news, visit bmi.com, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @BMI or stay connected
through Broadcast Music, Inc.‘s Facebook page. Sign up for BMI’s The Weekly™ and receive our
e-newsletter every week to stay up to date on all things music.
For press enquiries please contact:
Gary Smith
Head of Marketing
ICE
gary.smith@iceservices.localhost
Tel: +49 171 2643172
Jodie Thomas
BMI
JThomas@bmi.com
Tel: 212-220-3142