by Mark Eades
Manager Publisher Services, APRA|AMCOS

Since the departmental restructure of APRA|AMCOS in February, it has been our intention to integrate both performing and mechanical right catalogue administration processes (i.e. the ongoing processing of publishers’ agreement registrations and changing of division-of-fee ownership for works in affected catalogues), which have previously been handled separately by Publisher Representatives and Mechanical Catalogue Administrators. Following training undertaken by Publisher Services staff over the last few months, the integration of performing and mechanical catalogue administration has now been achieved.

Members please note well the following important changes to the way you communicate with Publisher Services:

• You should now contact your Publisher Representative with any query relating to agreement registrations and catalogue ownership, regardless of whether the query is for performing or mechanical right ownership or both. Please discontinue sending or cc'ing emails to the group email address mech@apra.com.au for mechanical right ownership queries.
  
  
• Queries relating to individual work ownership disputes, regardless of whether they are for performing or mechanical right ownership or both, should from now on be sent to the new group email address dispute@apra.com.au, which will be read by Research and Copyright Administrators Chris Moller, Daniel Threadgold and Matt Barber (Matt has become a Research and Copyright Administrator now that the Mechanical Catalogue Administrator role no longer exists). It is no longer necessary to send emails regarding disputes to both Chris Moller and mech@apra.com.au.
  
  We understand that some publishers are used to sending individual work dispute queries to their Publisher Representative, however we request your co-operation in now sending these queries to dispute@apra.com.au. Of course, please cc your Publisher Representative on any work ownership dispute queries that relate to a wider catalogue dispute / ownership change matter, or if you want them to be aware of progress regarding the dispute for any reason.

As a consequence of the integration of performing and mechanical right catalogue administration work, the Publisher Representative for certain publishers will change once APRA distribution 44B processing is complete; affected publishers will be notified of these changes individually.

Please call me on 02 9935 7775 if you have any questions regarding the above.