PPL is also empowered by record labels (on the basis of the rights they hold) to deliver licences to radio stations based in the UK and the resulting royalties are divided 50/50 between the performers and labels. The collecting society to which performers traditionally assign their right to receive equitable remuneration is the Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL), whose members are comprised of performers and record labels. The right is personal and performers may not assign their right, except to a collecting society. This was later translated in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (“UK Copyright Act”) which accorded performers the right to receive equitable remuneration when a sound recording is communicated to the public by broadcasting or otherwise. To address radio providers’ concern that the international recognition of these two new set of rights should not alter the way in which they accessed music, the drafters of the Rome Convention invented the concept of ‘equitable remuneration’, which required that a pre-determined sum be paid by broadcasters (or anyone communicating phonograms to the public) to “ performers, or to the producers of the phonograms, or to both” 3 in exchange for their use of sound recordings. The right was later recognized by the international community and extended to performers, when the Rome Convention 1 was adopted in 1961 2. In the UK, phonogram producers or, to use a more recognisable term, record labels, have been afforded performing rights since the Copyright Act 1911. As a result, copyright law - which until then only recognized the existence of copyright in musical compositions - was made to adapt to the new technological environment and the concept of owning rights in a sound recording started to emerge. When radio was introduced, at the turn of the 20th century, the phonograph record industry was concerned that they would see no gain from the popularity of radio and the ‘free’ music it provided. In 2017, Warner Music and Sony Music (together, the “Claimants”) initiated a claim against TuneIn before the High Court, alleging that TuneIn was more than a mere Internet intermediary and that TuneIn was, in effect, infringing on the rights they hold in their respective sound recordings, by allowing users based in the UK to access online radio streams without a licence to do so. Over the years, TuneIn capitalised on technological innovations and bolstered its monetisation of its service by using deep links, pre-roll and in-stream advertisements targeted at users within their particular territories.Īs it became more popular, TuneIn’s development and increased technological sophistication captured the attention of music rightholders. Later, TuneIn introduced ‘broadcaster terms’, which all new stations were required to accept. TuneIn launched in the early noughties as a rudimentary service, using web-crawlers to index radio streams without seeking permission from those radio streams. TuneIn provides its users with hyperlinks to radio streams that are freely available on the Internet.

(“TuneIn”) is a San Francisco-based developer of an online platform which provides a service that indexes and enables its users to access the online feeds of radio stations from around the world. Major record companies Warner Music UK Ltd (“Warner Music”) and Sony Music Entertainment UK Ltd (“Sony Music”) account for more than half the market for digital sales of recorded music in the UK, and about 43% globally. In this article, we consider the main implications of the decision and why, for certain types of radio station, they are likely to have a limited impact following the transposition of the new Satellite and Cable directive (Directive 2019/789) across the European Union. With no licences covering streams beyond each radio station’s home state, TuneIn was found to have infringed the rights of the two major record labels.

The Court rejected TuneIn’s defence that it was simply a sophisticated search engine for radio streams, and found that both the tech company and the radios were communicating music to the public. The case, which threatened to “break the Internet” (according to the defendant), hinged on the interpretation of the copyright law concept of ‘communication to the public’ in circumstances where online radio streams licensed locally are made available globally by way of an internet link. On 1 November 2019, the High Court of England and Wales published its decision in the case between Warner Music and Sony Music (the claimants), and the radio app provider, TuneIn (the defendant).

Tunein international radio stations