ASCAP reported its annual revenues for 2014 this week, indicating that it had generated more than $1 billion during the calendar year, becoming the first performance rights organization to crack ten digits. That total marked an impressive 6 percent gain from 2013 (from The Hollywood Reporter).
"ASCAP had an incredibly successful 2014," ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews said. "We worked extremely hard and continually innovated in order to maximize the financial opportunities for our members in the face of an evolving and increasingly competitive global landscape. We implemented new revenue growth strategies and productivity improvement initiatives in order to deliver the best collective licensing value proposition at the lowest possible cost for all stakeholders."
Understand of course that the total doesn't reflect all of what was distributed to performers by the organization during the year, but that total was also significantly higher, rising 3.7 percent to $883 million. The difference in percentages between revenues and distributions may be a reflection of the new initiatives ASCAP has enacted to better suit the new music market and its tendency toward streaming and internet radio providers.
ASCAP has expanded its surveys of internet music providers and identified 1.3 billion unique pieces of music being played during the year...a whopping 30-times more than the 43,000 songs identified for payments during 2013. Those surveys resulted in nine-times as many performers receiving payments (while bigger performers probably received even more payouts thanks to wider slices of their discographies receiving play). The total number of songs tracked by the PRO during the year amounted to 500 billion...twice as many as the previous year.
That hasn't replenished the profits lost from dropping album sales but at least we know there's still money somewhere in the music industry. Let's see how it expands during 2015.
