Exclusive: Tour Tech Teams Up With NIVA On All Things PRO

American copyright law is notoriously arcane, and most venue owners and promoters would prefer not to wander in its labyrinths.

In the live space, the major intersection with intellectual property is with the performance rights organizations, which are empowered to collect licensing fees from venues and then distribute royalties to rightsholders — songwriters and composers. That sounds straightforward but it’s a lot more complicated than it seems.

Even a veteran venue owner who has faithfully paid their licensing fee to ASCAP for years can suddenly find themselves on the wrong end of a demand letter from a PRO they’ve never heard of (and never paid) because the bassist of the indie band that played two weeks ago deserves to get compensated for her contribution to the songwriting just as much as the lead singer who’s repped by ASCAP.

And that’s when not thinking about the esoterica of intellectual property law runs into the reality of the checkbook.

The many-hat-wearing Tobi Parks lives in this intersection most people avoid. She owns Des Moines venue xBk. She’s a musician herself. She’s an entertainment and IP attorney who was director of copyright for Sony Music for 13 years.

And she’s the founder of Tour Tech, a startup that builds tech solutions for the live industry.

One of those solutions is Setlist Aggregator & Royalty Application — SARA. It’s a user-friendly program that makes submitting setlists to the PROs — all of them at once — easy.

“We are in what we’re considering a beta testing phase where we’re taking on by invite-only a handful of touring artists and trying out the technology and kicking the wheels,” Parks says. “As we continue to navigate our relationships with the PROs and how all new technology kind of comes into the marketplace, how the dust settles with that. At the end of the day, I think everybody has the same end goal: we want to make sure that creators get paid. That’s what PROs do, it’s not an easy task, and their work is gargantuan, and we just want to make that a little bit easier.”

In addition, Tour Tech and the National Independent Venue Association are announcing a partnership where Tour Tech is the one-stop shop “for all things PRO.”

“We work with NIVA’s board and staff, and NIVA’s overall relationship with PROs and helping them navigate broader industry issues in that area,” she says. “Whenever they have questions around licensing. So I have spent my days working on our technology and fielding a lot of questions from NIVA members and folks that are opening new businesses and trying to help them navigate the U.S. licensing system.”

PROs can be intimidating and the relationship between them and venues can get prickly, but Parks says at the end of the day, everyone in the equation benefits.

“Live music has become the primary revenue driver for what I call the middle- class musician, the road warriors that are keeping my doors open. Folks that are on that tier, touring has gotten more expensive, and for us as venue owners and promoters, there’s not many more levers we can pull to get those creators more money,” she says. “In this instance, there’s a big pool of money that’s sitting out there that a lot of them are not participating in, and all we’re trying to do is get them into that pool of money, because if I can get more money into their pockets, ideally they stay on tour longer, which means that my doors continue to stay open.”