Audiovisual

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The Audiovisual Division of the AFM & SAG-AFTRA Intellectual Property Rights Distribution Fund was established 2010 as the result of negotiations for a bi-lateral agreement with AIE, Sociedad de Gestión – the collective management organization in Spain. With the addition of a bi-lateral agreement between the Fund and GVL, Gesellschaft zur Verwertung von Leistungsschutzrechten – the German Rights Collective, the AV Division distributes payments collected from any television show or motion picture that is broadcast on Spanish or German television that contains the performance of an AFM musician and/or SAG-AFTRA vocalist. Both featured and non-featured performers are subject to royalty payments.

Non-Featured artist's are defined as follows

Instrumental musicians, music preparation personnel (contractors and orchestrators) and vocalists' non-featured artist's credits are calculated on a title by title basis as follows: each individual non-featured performer on the underscore receives a single credit (2 credits for contractors and orchestrators) for their performance on a particular title regardless of the number of cues or parts performed, and each individual non–featured performer on a sound recording licensed for use in a television show or motion picture receives a single credit for their performance regardless of the number of different recording used in a particular show/picture or number of parts performed.

Featured artists' are defined as follows

For the underscore of a film or television program, the conductor and any soloist identified in the credits, end crawl or otherwise acknowledged as a primary soloist (other than an incidental solo performed as a member of the orchestra).

On the sound recordings licensed for use in a motion picture or television production, the features artist(s) is the royalty artist (headliner), or artist associated with the particular sound recording.

Royalties for featured artists are based on a pro-rata share of the actual time that their performances are utilized in the total score. The royalties earned by underscore and sound recordings are based on the ratio of actual minutes of underscore music versus sound recording minutes. Four shares are provided to each featured artist on an underscore. 60% of the available royalties are distributed to featured artists for sound recordings. 40% of the available royalties are distributed to non-featured artists for sound recordings.


This fund distributes payments collected for royalties covering featured and non featured performance rights for both sound recordings licensed for use in motion pictures and for motion pictures underscore.

As a result of ongoing negotiations with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), we anticipate that there will be a number of other countries providing such rights prospectively.