BMI announces partnership with ICE

15 December 2020 - Press release

BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) is partnering with ICE to license portions of its repertoire to digital music services operating across Europe.

While much of BMI's award-winning repertoire has been available on a multi-territorial basis to pan-European digital music services for many years through initiatives to match these rights to multi-territorial mechanical rights, some works, commonly known in the European market as "reciprocal repertoire," have still been licensed and administered on a territory-by-territory basis by local societies.

This new partnership fills the gap by making the remaining musical works from BMI's repertoire available to Pan-European digital service providers in one central hub through the ICE Core. "BMI continues to applaud the invaluable work that the local CMOs perform every day for our songwriters, composers and music publishers, and we also appreciate the challenge that digital music services face in securing rights for their services across Europe," said Ann Sweeney, Senior Vice President, International & Global Policy, BMI. "This new collaboration with ICE helps to meet that challenge by providing an efficient one-stop-shop to the European DSPs and supports our continued effort to serve BMI's music creators when their creative works are performed digitally in Europe."

"We're delighted to welcome BMI to the ICE Core," commented Ben McEwen, VP Commercial, ICE. "At this time, it's more critical than ever that rightsholders have the best online licensing representation, with the expertise and shared resources to really address the market on their behalf, and we believe that ICE can provide that for BMI."

Thorsten Sauer, CEO, ICE, added, "We are grateful for the partnership with BMI and the opportunity to represent some of their songwriters, composers and music publishers. We are looking forward to support BMI and their members with ICE's end to end services from copyright to processing and licensing. As ever, our response is working even harder for each and every rightsholder, big or small."