Pan-European licensing hub ICE Services reports to have distributed more than €1 billion to rightsholders in a consecutive 12-month period for the first time (May 2023-April 2024 inclusive).
With this distribution milestone passed, ICE says that it has now delivered a total of €4.5 billion (approx $4.88bn at current exchange rates) since its first royalty distributions in 2016.
Based in the UK, Germany and Sweden, ICE represents over 330,000 rightsholders and reports to have processed “trillions of online music uses from music streaming services” to date.
ICE was formed by three collection societies — PRS for Music (UK), STIM (Sweden) and GEMA (Germany)
The company’s ICE Core license includes repertoire of collection societies PRS, STIM, GEMA, IMRO, BMI, Sabam, AKM as well as independent publishers Concord, Songtrust and peermusic and a range of other independent publishers represented through PRS’s Core Collective initiative.
The ICE copyright database holds over 54 million musical works.
ICE says that it has delivered “consistent improvements” to its systems and processes since 2016, which, it adds, “have benefited songwriters”.
The company reports that its “Multi-Stage invoicing” has brought in over €180 million more in royalties, “paid to writers on an accurate musical works usage basis’.
On the licensing side, in 2020, ICE launched an online self-service tool called Licensr that allows smaller online music services to get multi-territory coverage for use of the ICE Core repertoire.
Commenting on the €1 billion distribution milestone, ICE CEO Peter de Mönnink, said: “Distributing €1bn in 12 months to rightsholders is a major achievement, reflecting the hard work, expertise, and innovation of everyone at ICE in ensuring our customers can deliver to their members.”
“Distributing €1bn in 12 months to rightsholders is a major achievement, reflecting the hard work, expertise, and innovation of everyone at ICE in ensuring our customers can deliver to their members.”
Peter de Mönnink, ICE
Added de Mönnink: “Despite their crucial role, copyright and music publishing often do not receive the recognition they deserve. Music is the cornerstone of today’s digital services, with customer experiences built around the value of music and the importance of songwriting.
“The increasing scale of the ICE Hub is paramount to offer the highest and most efficient distributions for songwriters and composers. It is ICE’s belief that this scale will be evermore important to ensure fair and sustainable royalty flows for rightsholders in the online space. This is not only our mission, but also our passion.
“To support our ongoing efforts, and address the complexities of royalty management, ICE has a very strong focus on scalability facilitated by its ongoing platform development. Whilst this innovative undertaking presents significant challenges, we are pleased with the progress we have made. ICE is now moving step by step into deployment phases of this advanced platform.
“ICE is on a path of continuous innovation, to deliver more royalties, at less cost, with an even better service.”
“We are extremely proud to have delivered more royalties, faster and with optimised accuracy to our customers, which in turn allows increased onward distributions to their Songwriters and Composers, enabling them to continue creating.”
Rachael Naylor, ICE
Rachael Naylor, Chief Operating Officer, ICE, said: “We are extremely proud to have delivered more royalties, faster and with optimised accuracy to our customers, which in turn allows increased onward distributions to their Songwriters and Composers, enabling them to continue creating.
“ICE are the touchpoint for a significant portion of distributions across a number of exploitation types in the industry, as well as online processing, and we recognize the vital importance of copyright excellence underpinning every service we offer now and in the future.”
Added Naylor: “Our recent customer survey results, with higher ratings across all service areas, evidences ICE’s heightened service performance. This has also been reflected in customers renewing with ICE, increasing the scope of services they take from us and even moving from other service providers.
“We do not underestimate the trust placed in us by our customers to deliver critical and reliable royalty services, and are driven to continue to transform internally to achieve the right mix of technical, service and process optimisation all delivered by truly committed and expert teams.”Music Business Worldwide
