Veteran writer-lyricist Javed Akthar, who is a chairperson of Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS), has said that no one can against law of the country by denying royalty to lyricists, music composers and music publishers in India.
Javed Akthar was interacting with the media at Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS) initiated royalty distribution programme for singers and music composers on Thursday in Mumbai .
Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS) is the authorised body holding copyright of lyricists, composers and music publishers in India. The society had recently granted a license to Google, enabling it to utilise the works of its members across YouTube and related services in the Indian region.
Talking about duties and achievements of Indian Performing Society, its chairperson Javed Akthar said, “IPRS (Indian Performing Rights Society) is a body who collects royalty from all over the world for writers and music composers and then distribute it among them. Earlier, we used to have issues like regarding it. We didn’t used to collect royalty properly and we didn’t used to know which song belongs to which music composer and which music label is there so, we didn’t had the perfect data but now we have worked on these issues.”
Akthar said that no one can act against the law of the country by denying royalty to the artistes, he said, “Now, if you see artistes are getting a lot of money than what they used to get earlier. Now, we corrected the data and improved collection of royalty. Not only within the country, we have started collecting royalty from international companies like Apple, YouTube, Amazon and Netflix. We have made agreements with them and In India, we have made agreements with big music companies except for one or two but I hope that they will also do agreement with us because no one can act against law of the country. It’s a law of the country and it is government recognised body. I think we have improved a lot but there is still a lot of scope to improve.”
When asked Akhtar whether he thinks that popularity of classical music has been diminished with the increasing popularity of pop and remix music, he said, “It is not that classical music doesn’t have any following in the country. I feel people still prefer to listen to classical music in places like hotel lobbies, rooms, airplanes and airports”
He added, “People also organise live events of classical music so, their royalty used to generate from everywhere but they (music composers, lyricist and singers) didn’t used to collect that thinking that who will go there to collect it but this is the first time we are giving royalty to veterans like Shivkumar Sharma (santoor player), Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia (classical flutist) an many other artistes. It is a big achievement for all of us and we are continuously working towards this initiative.”
