Byron Pascoe: SOCAN is an organization of nearly 200,000 members in Canada, fully composed of music writers and publishers but mostly composed of writers. And when writers write a song, whether they’re a beatmaker or producer or lyricist or rapper, etc., they register themselves as a SOCAN writer member, and they should also register all their compositions to SOCAN.
A lot of the time what I’m doing is going on SOCAN’s website, looking at their repertoire, looking up a composition and seeing who the writers and publishers are. And sometimes I discover that there are people listed there who are not subject to any agreement of a song that we’re licensing.
I remember one time, I was helping a producer put together some master use and synchronization licensing agreements, they gave me the names of every song, they knew who all the writers were and who created the recordings, and as an extra layer of due diligence, I went onto SOCAN’s website, I searched every composition, and for one composition I found that there was some other person listed who had the same last name as a writer we knew about, but it was some other person.
So, I asked the producer to go check this out and it ended up being the child of this composer. So, the composer listed themselves and their kid, which actually extends the life of a song when it goes into the public domain because if you’re 100 and your co-writer is 5, then the public domain starts way later, but that’s another topic.
[A film producer] can see on SOCAN who the writers are, or at least who is registered as a writer. SOCAN does not equal fact all the time. Just because someone is listed as a writer on SOCAN doesn’t mean that they actually wrote the song, but it’s a good way to do some due diligence to see whether or not someone is missing from the list of agreements.
SOCAN is not the only list that is out there. Oftentimes, I also look at the BMI and ASCAP lists. These organizations are similar to SOCAN but based in the US. They have a similar repertoire system but there are some songs listed there that aren’t on SOCAN’s lists, but the bottom line is that these performance rights organizations (PROs) have lists of compositions and those lists can be helpful to see whether or not there are people who may come after you if you don’t get their consent [to use their music in your production].
Byron Pascoe is an entertainment lawyer and partner at Edwards Creative Law
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