If USA gymnastics superstar Simone Biles She was going to perform her triple twist double backflip to Taylor Swift's song “…Ready For It?” at the Paris Olympics, as it did at the trials in late June, NBC almost certainly won't need a costly special license to broadcast the track live. NBC pays the performing rights organizations ASCAP, BMI and SESAC for general public performance licenses, and the PROs distribute the royalty payments to their hundreds of thousands of members, including songwriters, publishers and composers, from Paul McCartney to Dua Lipa and Swift herself .
Those payments can add up to a lot of money: The 2020 Olympics drew more than 3 billion viewers, a key factor in determining performance rights payments. “The larger the audience for the broadcast will generally result in higher royalties,” says an ASCAP spokesman.
For live TV or online live streaming, general licenses cover all necessary song rights — foreign PROs pay for overseas TV rights and US PROs pay for US rights. It becomes more difficult if NBC decides to use the song later in a delayed broadcast, tagged video or some kind of YouTube-style on-demand stream. In such cases, he says Joey ButlerWashington, DC entertainment and digital technology attorney and author The license seeker's guide through the legal jungle, NBC may require a separate synchronization license, negotiated with a publisher.
“But NBC may have reasons not to get that timing,” Butler adds. “They're reporting on the Olympics, which is a newsworthy event. This gives them excellent reasons to rely on fair use.”
Fair use refers to a US copyright doctrine in which a journalist may broadcast excerpts of a recorded song in the context of reporting a news story or quote lyrics when reviewing a record. If an NBC news report about Biles' performance at the Olympics garners a bit of “…Ready For It?”, that might qualify, but NBC should tread carefully. “Fair use is very volatile,” says Butler. “The cases go both ways. So you need to do a risk assessment if you have background music and you have a delayed or on-demand taped version.”
TV producers tend to be reluctant to contact rights holders and negotiate new (and perhaps expensive) new licenses when using a song in the background of a recorded video, Butler says: “It definitely happens that producers are careful and don't put the music to play, just make the video run without sound.” An NBC spokesman declined to comment for this story.
This rights-paying system can be cumbersome, but public venues like the Bercy Arena in Paris and broadcasters like NBC are used to it. “This is the same system that applies to all audiovisual programming, including other sporting events,” says the ASCAP spokesman.
