In a conversation with the composer, performer and producer of Rock, Ricardo Ochoa (notable for his groups Peace & Love and Nahuatl of the seventies), he told me that he has been fighting for several years to distribute the royalties that just and legally correspond to the Mexican musicians of all genres. For Roqueros the problem is more severe, because many of them, being very young, were contractually exploited and deceived by managers and producers. Due to censorship to rock unleashed after the Avándaro festival in 1971, Ochoa, like many Roqueros, emigrated to the United States, where it has been almost 50 years old.
Digital music and streaming have complicated the calculation, collection and distribution of royalties. The United States faced that challenge quite successful. Soundexchange (SE) is an American organization of collective management of non -profit rights created in 2003. It is the only organization designated by the United States Congress to collect and distribute royalties for digital execution of sound recordings. For recovery, an administrative royalty commission is subtracted and the rest is divided between the interpreter artists or performers of a recording and the head of the copyright of that work. The organization raises more than $ 1,000 million annually for distribution.
The legal support of Soundexchange is the Music Modernization Act of 2018, which, as its name says, is a law that modernizes and facilitates the mechanisms for creators to charge their royalties, especially digital music. To do this, that law created the Mechanical Licensing Collective mechanism, through which the authors are recorded to make it easier to track their works and proceed to the collection of royalties. This integrates a huge database. A distribution process is established through SE. The database also contains works whose holders of the patrimonial law are not identified and, therefore, the royalties have not been charged. Among them, there are many Mexican musicians. Ochoa argues that an effort to recover those resources that belong to national musicians should recover.
Since 1971, the Society of Music Executors of Mexico (SOMEM) exists in Mexico as a collective management society of public interest. It is a non -profit entity that represents the performing musicians, and is responsible for the collection of royalties. But also since 1945 there is the Society of Authors and Composers of Mexico (SACM) for the same purpose, so there are political struggles that harm musicians. The SACM has simple agreements with its counterparts from the United States; Somem no. The process for digital royalties is dispersed and inefficient and requires modernization.
Therefore, Ochoa’s demand is that the Government, Congress, Somem and SACM should attend and regulate the issue of digital royalties and work coordinously with their US counterparts to recover fair remuneration to the creativity of Mexican musicians, especially those of rock. Many of them, unfortunately, reach old age in precarious conditions, so recovering royalties can mitigate that condition.
