Concord and ICE have finalized an extended agreement. Photo Credit: Concord
Having enjoyed “significantly increasing royalties” since becoming an ICE Core direct member in 2018, Concord has officially inked a new multiyear agreement with the technology company.
London-headquartered ICE and the Nashville-based publisher announced their renewed tie-up this morning, via a brief release that was emailed to DMN. Now boasting north of 800,000 owned or administered copyrights, Concord has during the past three years experienced an over 34 percent “average year-on-year rise” in royalties, according to higher-ups.
Meanwhile, ICE – a joint initiative from London’s PRS, Stockholm’s STIM, and Berlin’s GEMA – is said to represent more than 330,000 rightsholders and maintain a database of some 49 million works. Bearing in mind the stats, the involved parties also took the opportunity to highlight the “significantly expanded” footprint of ICE – referring specifically to the entity’s presence in Sub-Saharan Africa and the quick-developing MENA region.
(The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry in 2022 declared MENA the fastest-growing music market and rolled out an “Official MENA Chart” covering 13 nations. Additionally, April of 2023 brought an Africa-centered partnership deal between PRS for Music and Rob Wells’ Orfium.)
In a statement, Concord chief publishing officer Jim Selby emphasized the “tremendous performance” that his company has achieved as part of ICE Core thus far.
“It’s a genuinely customer-centric partnership that we enjoy with everyone at ICE,” the former AdShare president Selby proceeded in part, “and that extends well beyond doing the initial deal. Backing up deep market understanding with systems that efficiently and effectively deliver actual royalties enables us to in turn deliver more to our writers.”
And in remarks of his own, ICE chief commercial officer Ben McEwen – whose company welcomed Austrian collection society AKM and its subsidiary Austro Mechana to ICE Core in December – reiterated his platform’s commitment to providing continued benefits to rightsholder members.
“The ICE Core brings together and supports a wide variety of rightsholder customers to deliver shared benefits, including leading independent publishers such as Concord,” indicated the former PRS for Music exec McEwen, whose current employer is said to have paid rightsholders around €3 billion since 2016. “We look forward to continuing to deliver royalties and enable our customers to provide new services for the songwriters and composers we all serve.”
Back in December, Concord completed a $1.8 billion bond sale and (along with BMG and Universal Music) named ISP Altice USA in a massive infringement suit. More recently, ICE unveiled a licensing agreement with metaverse startup STYNGR, which bills itself as “the gaming arm of the recorded music industry.”