You hear their hit tracks in restaurants, gyms and stadiums but singers say they don’t get a penny of royalty. But things are changing. Now, for the first time, around 700-odd vocalists have got their dues
Mohua Das (THE TIMES OF INDIA; April 15, 2018)

About a month ago, singer Aditi Singh Sharma walked into a recording studio to find the party anthem, Sooraj Dooba Hai, being intensely discussed. She exclaimed instinctively: “Oh, that’s my song!” The music makers in the room corrected her: It’s (the composer) Amaal Mallik’s song. “There was something so wrong with that sentence,” she recounts. “If I’m not entitled to a song I’ve sung, what am I left with? Similarly, a hit track is called a Ranbir-Deepika song. No one calls it the Vishal Dadlani-Shalmali Kholgade song. As long as the issue of royalty remains unresolved, singers will continue to be ignored.”

Singers, they’re known for speaking out on civil rights, politics, climate change and peace. Not so much for activism within their own industry or the disharmony beneath the surface. While film producers and music companies have been getting their share of profit from radio stations, TV channels, and online sites, singers like Aditi feel they are being rewarded less and less.

That may be changing now. After a long battle to secure royalty, the Indian Singers’ Rights Association (ISRA), a copyright collection society established in 2013, was able to collect a sum of Rs 52 lakh and distribute it among 730 singers for the first time.

“This is for 2016-17. For the year ending March 2018, we’ve already collected around Rs 1 crore, which too will soon be distributed,” explains Sanjay Tandon, CEO of ISRA. “What artistes have received maybe a nominal amount but it’s a start.”

Aditi, among the first batch of royalty recipients, says it’s a huge leap for singers. Unlike the previous generation of singers, careers these days are short-lived with new voices emerging every day. And not everyone does live shows where the money is better. “I’d probably have earned more in royalty than my fee for singing the song Dilli Dilli (in No One Killed Jessica) that was played everywhere in Delhi for two years since its release in 2010,” says Aditi.

Singer Sonu Nigam believes it is about giving singers their due respect and a sense of security. “Our fight wasn’t with music labels but what was due to us,” explains the singer, who along with Sunidhi Chauhan, had once walked out of the film Heartless when asked to sign away their royalty rights.

The question of equitable share of revenues dates back to the 90s when someone at a function called singers ‘vocal instruments’. To fix this anomaly, singers like Lata Mangeshkar, Sonu Nigam, Alka Yagnik and Tandon banded together and took up the matter with the government.

In what was hailed as a landmark amendment in the Copyright Act of 1957, ‘Performer’s Right’ came into effect in June 2012. The singer was granted economic rights, independent of the composer and songwriter. This meant that once a singer had recorded an original song, for the next 50 years, everyone except the producer needed their consent and would have to pay royalty to play or perform their song in public. Be it at a restaurant or gym, on radio and television, streamed through internet, or played by DJs.

“Till then it was a zamindari system where the tune belonged to the composer, the song to the lyricist and sound recording to the music company. Singers weren’t considered owners of copyright or entitled to any royalty. Starting June 21, 2012, they were added as a fourth party, entitled to 50% of whatever anyone earned worldwide using their voice,” explains Tandon.

Despite the recent triumphs, Tandon says the struggle to get royalty from television, radio and online streaming platforms still continues. “We can’t get complacent. They are the ones with the lion’s share of the music industry’s total revenue,” he says, pointing at the plight of older singers who have died in penury in the past. “Rajkumari Dubey and Mubarak Begum did not have money to even meet their basic needs. Financial aid by way of royalty could have helped them,” states Tandon.

HOW THE MUSIC MATH WORKS
Royalty that an eatery has to pay is calculated according to the “least priced drink on the menu card”; for big arena events, the licensing fee is Re 1 per seat; for airports and gyms the annual royalty is Re 1 per sq ft of the total carpet area; and for free online streaming platforms it is 50 paise per song. Thus, a pub where the cheapest drink costs Rs 20, has to pay an annual royalty of Rs 7,300 for any number of songs they play every evening, be it Lata Mangeshkar or Arijit Singh, while Wankhede Stadium which has a capacity of 33,108 would need to cough up the same digits in royalty for any number of songs played at each IPL match.