PROPS (Performance Royalty Open Payment System)

UPDATED - V1.01 (lots of small updates, though major update is that you now only have to enter song titles once on main page, then for each event can then choose from the list with a pulldown menu and it populates details accordingly)

When a song is performed live*, the writer of that song is meant to be paid a fee (royalty). These fees are meant to be collected, administered and paid out (in New Zealand) by APRA/AMCOS. I recently wrote about what a shambles this organisation is and until they create a transparent system that can show me that my fees are going to the correct people, I'm going to pay certain royalties myself.

I have created a system called "PROPS" (Performance Royalty Open Payment System) that anybody could employ. Currently it is only designed for use at one-off events as using it for several shows a week at a venue would be inefficient and it is certainly not designed for background music play or anything to do with recordings.

APRA/AMCOS and their royalty collection offer a great service for songwriters, if you're not a member and you're a songwriter, sign up now, its free! PROPS is only designed to bypass a very small part of their service and only until they sort their shit out.

This system is open source and at this stage is incredibly rudimentary and simply a spreadsheet that I have set up (and I'm pretty average at building them). If anybody wants to improve it by streamlining the spreadsheet or even by creating a front end attractive interface that populates the spreadsheet, that would be awesome. But for now, to download what you need to implement PROPS 1.0, download the package on the right.

*When recorded songs are played, a fee is paid to OneMusic, and distributed by Recorded Music NZ. If you have released any recordings, you should sign up with RMNZ here

If you'd like to be emailed when I release the next update of PROPS, pop your email address in below. Don't worry, you won't get signed up to my normal mailing list, only the PROPS notification list.

Clicking the above link will download a spreadsheet to your desktop. Upload that into your Google Drive (You must have a Google account to use PROPS). Make a duplicate file for each band and rename the file so you have one named for each band. Then share that document with each band.

Sorry about the lack of ease of this first version (1.0) of PROPS. At this stage I built it just for me and am not sure anybody else even wants this.