On 2nd April I had the pleasure of delivering a tailored training session to the team at Double Six Rights, Domino’s neighbouring rights services division. It was great to be back — I previously delivered a series of sessions for Double Six and the wider Domino group in 2023, and it’s always a real privilege to reconnect with a team that approaches rights with both commercial clarity and strategic depth.
While Double Six are already recognised as one of the leading expert teams in neighbouring rights management, the session began with a structured overview of core concepts and industry context. These opening sections were designed to support the training of newer team members, while also serving as a useful refresher for those with more experience. Feedback afterwards confirmed this dual-level approach had been helpful, striking the right balance between foundational clarity and wider industry insight.
Here’s a summary of the key themes we covered during the session:
We began by laying out the essential concepts of neighbouring rights: how they differ from copyright, who they benefit, and how they are monetised. In 2024, global collections for neighbouring rights reached $2.9 billion, representing roughly 10% of total music rights revenue. This is a substantial figure, but one that still suffers from significant disparities between countries and systems.
Much of the discussion centred on the distinction between exclusive rights (which allow a rights holder to authorise or prohibit use) and remuneration rights (which offer less control, but a legal right to be paid for certain types of use). For performers and labels, neighbouring rights are a form of remuneration tied to public usage — most commonly radio, TV, and usage of recordings in businesses open to the general public.
To bring this to life, we walked through a case study using Wet Leg as a practical example. The rights splits between the two songwriters who are also the main performers, the record label, and publisher (all essentially under the same roof at Domino) offered a useful illustration of how income flows back to different contributors in a typical release, and where data and accuracy matter most in making those flows work effectively.
Next, we tackled the thorny issue of who qualifies for neighbouring rights royalties, and under what conditions. This took us into the territory of international treaties — the Rome Convention and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT) — which define how performers and recordings qualify for protection across borders.
We looked at how the “points of attachment” affect eligibility to be paid. These include nationality, place of performance, or where a recording was first published. The way the law is implemented in various countries relates directly to how those countries treat these aspects of a recording, resulting the labels or performers being paid or not.
Recent legal decisions, such as the RAAP case in the EU, have shifted the boundaries of entitlement, compelling some EU countries to begin paying US performers despite the US’s lack of reciprocity. Other countries, notably France, have pushed back, holding payments in reserve or delaying implementation. We discussed what would be required to break this “impasse”.
At the time of the session, the UK’s own approach to foreign performer qualification had just gone through a public consultation process in 2024. The outcome had not yet been announced at the time of the session (2ndApril 2025), but PPL confirmed on 13th April that performers from Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore now automatically qualify for public performance royalties in the UK. This is as a result of the UK joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).
According to PPL’s announcement, the change means that performers from these three countries will now be entitled to equitable remuneration in the UK for any of their recordings played on radio, TV or in public spaces from 15 December 2024 onwards. This includes recordings released before that date, so long as they are protected under UK copyright law. The first royalty distributions under the new rules are scheduled for June 2025, covering airplay in the final weeks of 2024, with full calendar-year payments following in line with PPL’s usual schedules.
This is not only a meaningful development for individual performers, but a significant shift in how reciprocal rights frameworks can evolve through trade agreements — in this case, CPTPP acting as a trigger for formal rights recognition.
This is particularly good news for performers from these countries who have long been excluded from collecting revenues when their recordings have been used in the UK, even if it means a somewhat negative result to existing performers whose shares will be reduced slightly to accommodate the new performers being paid.
The US continues to present the biggest anomaly in global neighbouring rights. It is one of the only major markets where terrestrial radio does not pay either performers or producers for the use of sound recordings. This is due to the long-standing statutory position in the US where it has not been a signatory to the Rome Convention since its inception in 1961.
We explored the legislative efforts to change this, notably the stalled progress of the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA). While AMFA has enjoyed bipartisan support and the backing of organisations like RIAA, SoundExchange, and SAG-AFTRA, it has been fiercely opposed by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). The NAB’s countermeasure — the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act — seems to have successfully diverted attention away from AMFA, reframing the issue as one of public safety, emergency access and freedom of speech.
This resistance has broader consequences. Because the US offers no right to remuneration for terrestrial radio, it blocks international reciprocity, meaning that global performers are also unable to collect US FM radio royalties. This continues to affect treaty obligations and frustrate rights holders across the world.
We then turned our attention to metadata and data delivery, particularly the development and uptake of RDx, the data exchange platform co-developed by the independent sector to streamline submissions to collecting societies.
RDx, in combination with SoundExchange, now covers over 80% of global NR collections. Double Six is already successfully using RDx as part of its workflow, but looking at the latest information available on RDx onboarding of labels it’s clear that progress has stalled across the independent sector.
DDEX RDR standard, and then the RDx data platform, were both developed to streamline metadata delivery, and thereby resolve one of the key barriers to market access for recording rights-holders.
RDx is designed to reduce the data delivery burden for labels, and remove complexity from daily operations, but it does require participants to have the technical capacity to deliver DDEX messages. Despite RDx and SoundExchange together covering over 80% of global NR collections in market value terms, many indie labels still struggle with the technical capacity needed to participate. We discussed why this is the case, and what might be done to encourage better adoption of RDx by the very stakeholders for whom it was developed.
One of the outcomes from the session was a request for Sam to provide the team with a bit more background on how RDx works at an operational and system level.
Finally, we closed the session by reflecting on the broader question of what lies ahead for public performance rights and their distribution.
Some of the systemic issues are long-standing:
We asked: are we measuring the right things? Are speed, accuracy and cost the right metrics — and for whom? And if the system(s) is or are not currently fit for purpose, what would it take to build something better?
These are not easy questions, but they are important ones, especially as performance contexts shift, platforms evolve, and expectations around rights, revenues, fairness, and transparency continue to rise.
Thanks so much to Sam Heerey and the Double Six Rights team for the invitation to run this session, and for the thoughtful engagement throughout. As neighbouring rights continue to evolve — legally, operationally, and politically — there will continue to be a lot to analyse and understand in practical terms.
I look forward to continuing the conversation with the Double Six team as we continue to navigate this complex but important area of our industry.