By Jeoffrey Mukubi
The Namibian Society of Composers and Authors of Music (NASCAM) recently announced that its members are set to receive their royalties before the end of this year.
This was after NASCAM Chief Executive Officer John Max told the media at a briefing that because this year saw live music performances reduced drastically, its members had little to no income after the State of Emergency was implemented in March.
“There is a serious concern amongst the NASCAM members, and the NASCAM Office received several calls from the members and they should be assured that there will be Royalties payments this year,” he said.
According to Max, the total Royalties expected to be paid out to its members is in the range of N$ 1.1 million received from the NBC Radio and TV for the music used during 2019.
NASCAM also received N$300 000 in Royalties from the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association (CAPASSO), a sister Collective Management Organization in South Africa.
These Royalties were collected from digital platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Spotify and I-Tunes as well as other online music platforms for members of NASCAM that registered their content IP’s with the organization.
“We urge our members to indicate to our office which of their music has been uploaded onto those digital music services to enable smooth processing of identifying their musical works,“ Max continued.
This is a milestone as it will be the first time that CAPASSO will be paying Royalties to Namibian artists that are registered with NASCAM. This will be done after a complete schedule statement will be sent to NASCAM which will ultimately determine how much an Artist will receive from his/ her music that had been streamed on the online platforms.
Furthermore, NASCAM also applied for fishing quotas in 2018 in a plan to generate extra income, apart from royalty collections.
“Our application was rejected and we have lodged an appeal to be reconsidered and we are still waiting for the responses from the Ministry of Fishers and Marine Resources and as soon we have received feedback,” said Max.
He also mentioned that NASCAM had been trying to appeal to corporate and government for Covid -19 relief packages and to only some avail, the organization managed to get relief for some of their members from the Social Security Commission as well as from MTC.
