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Who Gets Paid When a Song Is Used In an Olympics Routine?
Whether gymnastics routines or ice skating choreography, music plays a big role at the Olympics. But who gets paid when a song is played?
If U.S. gymnastics superstar Simone Biles were to perform her triple-twisting double backflip to Taylor Swift’s “…Ready For It?” at the Paris Olympics, as she did at the trials in late June, NBC almost certainly won’t need a costly special license to air the track live. NBC pays performing rights organizations ASCAP, BMI and SESAC for blanket public-performance licenses, and the PROs distribute the royalty payments to their hundreds of thousands of members, such as songwriters, publishers and composers, from Paul McCartney to Dua Lipa to Swift herself. In such cases, says Joy Butler, a Washington, D.C., entertainment and digital-technology attorney and author of The Permission Seeker’s Guide Through the Legal Jungle, NBC might need a separate synch license, negotiated with a publisher.
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