How PRiSK's R-Kay beat all

After the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) released royalties for the last financial year to artistes, the other giant collective management organisation, Performers Rights Society of Kenya (PRiSK) has followed suit.

And even as top artistes among them Sauti Sol, Wyre, Daddy Owen, Willy, Jack Sam, P-Unit, DNA, Luck Njeri and Gloria Muliro shared the top gains, it was R-Kay who topped the charts to awkward murmurs from some quarters.

Now for those who do not know, R-Kay is the PRiSK chairman with Angela Ndambuki being the CEO. The question was how the chairman could get the lion’s share. Basically, some members wanted to know if the payment process had been transparent.

Ironically, what they forgot to see was the fact that the CEO Angela Ndambuki was the least paid member. Indeed, she made almost zero money and joked; “I think I am going back to singing. These guys are making cash.”

“The amounts were derived depending on the role each person played on each recording. R-Kay was the highest paid as he had declared over 100 recordings to which he was the track performer, that is, he created the track. We pay all performers on a sound recording,” a statement released by PRiSK on our request read in part.

For this distribution (2013 amounts), we used the analogy method whereby we clustered radio stations according to regions and used the distributable amounts in those regions as per the logs generated by our Reelforge Monitoring system. The system has fingerprints of the songs in our repertoire and matches those through our other system,” the statement had it.

“So what is this analogy method,” someone asked. We sought PRiSK for answers.

According to PRiSK, their distribution system is based on three formulas.

(1) Census – This is the preferred basis for all distribution sections.

A census distribution involves data collection, processing and payment for every single performance, often referred to as pay-per-play.

(2) Sample – Where census distribution is not feasible, PRiSK seeks to collect a representative sample of actual performances as the basis to distribute total section revenue.

This method is effective when music usage is highly repetitive or there is a small breadth of total repertoire used.

(3) Analogy – An analogy based payment is used for any distribution section where census and sample methods are not feasible. It implies the best reliable statistic rule. This means that the use of statistics most comparable to source of income shall be applicable. This is usually because sufficient data is not readily available.

The analogy method uses a similar, or analogous data set as the basis for revenue distribution. Analogy is most frequently used for general communication to the public distribution.