P-Square and Soundcity WAR Get Messy...

 P-Square and Soundcity WAR Get Messy as Soundcity replies Jude Okoye on Allegation of “FREE Shows, Blackmailing and Non-payment of Royalties…”

Jude Okoye the manager and President of Square Records, the label formed by P-Square, steps in and accuses Soundcity of not paying royalties for use of their music videos.

 

 

Sound City Responds to Jude Okoye

Dear Jude and @SoundcityTV Fans,
Thank you for your tweets Jude; we will certainly address each of these tweets, especially since they are some sorts of allegation:

• We don’t pay Royalties? Your job as a manager is to ensure your artistes’ get their royalty pay cheques. Check with COSON and MCSN, SOUNDCITY pays Royalties every calendar year for music use on Soundcity and on sister channels, the platform carriers (DStv) doubles that effort too. Perhaps you should ask your colleagues in the industry about how that works. COSON is the Copyright Society of Nigeria and MCSN is the Musical Copyright Society of Nigeria, also you can learn more about COSON here http://www.cosonng.com.
• We suggest rather than you wanting to ‘create’ a union in ‘we artiste’…you should speak and deal with your group squarely. NOBODY ever asked for your group to perform for FREE, only that we asked for a reasonable performance fee. You wanted to charge 10 or 12 Million or so. We are glad that a lot of artistes came through and yes; they played to their fans at the free event, for free.
• Your job is to co-direct videos, and manage the group and ensure you do things in their best interest ‘reasonably’. Ours is to play the videos if we see them deem fit. Luckily, all your videos are co-directed with Clarence Peters, one of Nigeria’s biggest music video directors, partly a Soundcity Alumni. Please read between the lines of ‘reserving the rights to play.’ to fully understand what it means. Meanwhile, interestingly…our job also partly runs along us advising your group as per better professional input from us, for free.
• Of course, we did not think we are doing your group a ‘Favour’. Just like any other artistes, if you have a great material, we will showcase it on our channel and various platforms. Supporting, promoting, nurturing a talent isn’t a favour. It is obligatory, indeed?
• ‘Begging PSquare’ to Tour with? We needed the content? Soundcity is a music and lifestyle channel, music and music programming forms 80% of our content while lifestyle handles the remainder. We are pretty sure the expense of touring with you then was much more than rotating music videos, make a business case out of this and you’ll see for yourself why we wouldn’t have ‘begged’ as you have claimed in your tweets…but hey! We did it for the LOVE!
• What Blackmail? You decided not to work with our brand, we decided not to work with your brand by withdrawing your videos from our channel and completely stopped doing business with you. Not sure that’s what ‘Blackmail’ means. You took a decision, we took ours too. Simple.
• Lastly, we will do something rewarding for you today! Please tune in by 3PM to watch #PSQUARE: THEN & NOW! Fans will be able to catch videos from the early years to present and also, #PSQUARE vs. #USHER: ORIGINAL DANCE OFF! By 3:30 PM today. Really, there is no such thing as ‘Boycott’ in premium entertainment.
• Actually, scratch that! We should but we won’t. We will do #CHRISBROWN vs #USHER: DANCEOFF for 3PM today instead, #ChrisBrown is trending right now on the Internet.This is the last time we are speaking on this, we have a number one TV channel to run. Thank you. 

Editor’s Note: I think it is high time COSON comes out to tell all Nigerian artistes (especially those they are collecting the royalties on their behalf) the parameter they are using to measure airplay of songs and their payment structures to know what is due to which artistes…
Publishing or making available periodically payments made to artiste will solve issues of royalties’ payments between media houses and artistes since the media houses make payments to COSON.

Additional info from Africa Music Law