Facebook has signed a music licensing deal with the Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS) to strengthen its music library across its social networking platform and Instagram.
The IPRS is a representative body of authors and owners, which include composers, lyricists, and owner publishers of music.
While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, the social networking giant said it will cover licensing and royalties whenever music represented by the IPRS is used on Facebook and Instagram.
Following this deal, users will be able to choose and add “hundreds and thousands of songs” from the IPRS repertoire to their videos and stories via music stickers. Instagram’s short video feature Reels, which is currently being piloted in India, is also likely covered in this deal.
“Music plays an important role in India for sparking people’s creative expression. With this agreement, people will be able to access a wide variety of music and discover new scores from hundreds of authors and owners, across various genres in many Indian languages,” said Manish Chopra, Director and Head of Partnerships, Facebook India.
IPRS chairman Javed Akhtar said this partnership will create opportunities for songwriters and composers for their use of works on Facebook and its platforms. “The future is brighter when all industries work together and evolve the next phase of music usage together.”
“We are happy that more and more companies are respecting copyright and coming forth to seek proper licenses from IPRS,” added IPRS chief executive officer Rakesh Nigam.
This partnership comes a month after Facebook signed a similar deal with Saregama to get access to a catalogue of over 100,000 songs across several different genres including film songs, devotional music, ghazals & indipop in more than 25 languages. It also closed deals with three of India’s top music labels including T-Series, Zee Music Company, and Yash Raj Films.
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