Australian Music Presenter Reviews:

Paula Rosenbauer was the first of a number of weekly speakers who will talk to us about certain aspects of the music industry in Australia. She was a representative from APRA (Australasian Performing Right Association), a company which "collects and distributes royalties for songwriters, composers and publishers through licensing agreements with music users. APRA currently has over 41,000 members but represents over a million songwriters worldwide through it's affiliations with overseas societies". I copied that from the introduction on the course outline we were handed out, but as you can see the "it's" in the last sentence is wrong, because "it's" is an abbreviation for "it is". A better word in that place would have been "its". Having decided to copy most of the paragraph word by word, however, I found it hard to resist the temptation of also copying the mistake and later pointing it out. That later is now, and I pointed it out in the last sentence as well as this one. I will now cease to point out the mistake for the remainder of the review.

Paula explained that in Australia, APRA takes care of protecting the rights of music makers and performers by monitoring the industry and making sure they are paid all the royalties they should be. While in Australia copyright exists as soon as you put an idea into a physical form (which can be as little as writting some notes on a page) it is hard for individuals to know if their rights are being infringed. Basically it is good to be a member if you want to earn royalties from your music in any way.

FACT!!!

1 in 400 Austarlians is an APRA member. So if you walk down Rundle Mall you might see 1 or so. You can then proceed to interact with him/her. Females can also apply to be APRA members; there are currently no gender restrictions.