To Withdraw or Not to Withdraw?
A few weeks ago, in Rights Without Borders, I made the point that qualifying repertoire can be pulled out of collective management and licensed directly, while BIEM repertoire effectively cannot because in the BIEM world the society owns the mechanical right rather than merely administering it.
The obvious follow-up question, and the one I get asked most often by publishers somewhere between independent and major, is: fine- but should we?
It is usually framed as a status question, where withdrawal sounds like some sort of graduation- the moment you stop being administered and start being in control. I'd argue it is almost entirely a capability question instead, and that the industry's own history makes this point for us.
What You Are Actually Taking On
The precedent often reached for is the majors, and it is worth being precise about what happened, and why.
DSPs were game for bespoke licences- with terms adapted to each service rather than a standard society rate card. Meeting that required the majors to withdraw their qualifying repertoire from the societies and negotiate individually, service by service. As the IMPF/IMPEL outline in their licensing handbook, no two of those licences were identical, and the result gave the movers a real advantage over everyone still relying on collective licensing.
Withdrawal worked, but with a precondition for it to be feasible. The majors were able to withdraw because they already had the capability that facilitated it: the negotiating leverage, the legal resource, the repertoire data, the processing infrastructure and, critically, the ability to chase what they were owed afterwards. Withdrawal didn't create a single advantage, but also leveraged an advantage they already possessed.
Strip away the strategy and withdrawal is at its heart an operational transfer. Everything the society was doing on your behalf becomes yours to do. There are multiple phases to this sort of rights transfer- many of which are mirrored in how funds need rights to move upon acquisition as well.
Firstly it’s a negotiation (with the research phase mattering more than the negotiation itself). Secondly once over the line it’s setting up the mechanics to follow the terms of the deal, which is where income quietly fails to appear. Until a deal is properly established, with catalogue and copyright information delivered and correctly acknowledged, there is no income at all. Finally it’s processing and invoicing, and then the least glamorous and most valuable activity of all, which is checking that you have actually been paid what the deal says.*
Under collective management, the society is the first link in the chain: it receives the DSP's usage report, matches recordings to works, and claims. Withdraw, and that becomes your responsibility.
This means the honest test of readiness is not whether you have the leverage to negotiate a licence, but whether you can reliably tell a DSP what you own, in a form their systems can consume, and then identify your usage in reports of several hundred million lines. If your repertoire data isn't in a state to support that, withdrawal converts a data problem you had offshored into one that is borne out of your own operational capability and data integrity.
Getting Out Is Slower Than You Think
European societies may permit members to limit or withdraw categories of rights, but the mechanics are deliberately unhurried. Several societies only allow withdrawals to take effect at the start of the following calendar year- miss the notice window by a month and you wait another twelve (often like terminations!). Some require the request to pass through board meetings before it takes effect at all, which feels controlling and blocking to say the least.
The realistic timeline from deciding to withdraw to licensing anything yourself runs into many months, and frequently more than a year- before you have even negotiated a single deal. This isn't necessarily an argument against doing it, but for deciding early. The cost of getting the sequencing wrong is an entire year of being neither properly administered nor properly independent.
It’s also worth adding that opt-out terms can change, and vary considerably by society. Anyone seriously considering a significant rights move should check the current position directly rather than relying on what was true a few years ago.
The Middle Path Most People Should Take
Between full collective management and going it alone sits a 3rd option that suits most publishers: a licensing collective.
The principle is straightforward- independent publishers pool their rights and license together, creating scale to leverage at the negotiating table. Operations such as ICE’s Core Collective and IMPEL are great success stories that speak to the collective bargaining power joining with other indies can bring.
Joining such a collective also improves your ability to influence your partner society's distribution policies*, because the collective's contract with its administration partner is negotiable in a way a society membership agreement simply isn't.
This is a key facet of the entire argument for moving rights management and licensing. A membership agreement is a take-it-or-leave-it document ,whereas a commercial contract is a negotiation. The collective route doesn't just get you better rates- it gets you a seat at the table where the decisions that actually determine your income are made, without requiring you to build a licensing department to get there.
The Practical Test
There’s 5 questions to answer when looking at these arrangements:
Is your repertoire qualifying at all? If your writers aren't members of a qualifying PRO, the conversation ends here- there is nothing to withdraw.
How much income is genuinely at stake? Digital mechanical, in the territories concerned, as a share of total collections. If it's a small slice, the operational cost will exceed the upside and you are doing this for the feeling rather than the money.
Can you deliver your repertoire data to a DSP's standard, as of today?
If you got paid incorrectly next quarter, would you know? If the answer is anything other than a confident yes, you won’t be ready to be your own first link.
Can you influence distribution policy where you are now? If yes, the case for leaving weakens considerably. If no, this could be the strongest argument on the table for moving- to a collective, if not to full independence.
The framing I'd resist is withdrawal as a rite of passage. Plenty of publishers would collect more money by staying exactly where they are and fixing their registrations first, and plenty of others are leaving real income with a society whose policies they have no say over.
Both of those are capability questions, and they have different answers for different businesses. What they have in common is that neither is answerable until you know precisely what you own and where your money currently comes from.
Control is not the same as access- and it isn't the same as ownership either. You can own the rights, hold the licence, and still not control the outcome if you can't see what is happening to your money.
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*Distribution policies are often underestimated in these arrangements. How monies are distributed may be the single biggest factor in how much you receive- potentially more significant than the deal terms themselves. A policy means somebody made a decision, and if you are not in the room where those decisions are made, then you aren’t party to them.
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