It's that time of year again. Time to get your Live Performance Returns up to date if you want to collect any royalties this year for your music.
Royalties? What do you mean royalties? Ahhhh, I guessed as much. How many of you musicians out there are playing your original music at your gigs? Not all of you may realize that you are able to claim royalties for playing your own music.
How can this be I hear you ask. Well first of all, you need to become a writer member of APRA. Then you register your original music with them, which is a good idea even if you dont play them live. Then it's a matter of simply completeing the LPR's or Live Performance Returns on the APRA website.
It's a simple process of logging all the gigs you played throughout the year and also which original songs you played and how many times you played them. It's a handy idea to keep a diary or something on your computer for keeping track of this stuff through the year.
Then once your LPR has been lodged, the nice people at APRA will pay you royalties for your perfomances. No they are not some incredibly generous fairies that live in wonderland and love to give out free money.
The way it works is this. The venues at wich you perfom in must pay a license fee to APRA each year that gives them permission to play copyrighted material. That includes your songs. APRA collects fees from any where that plays music whether its live of recorded. At the end of the year they do their calculations and then distribute those royalties between its members based on your LPR.
So what are you waiting for? Get over to the APRA website and learn more about what they can do for you as an Australian musican.
Become band friendly
If you have the benefit of running a small home studio, this tip might come in very handy for you.
