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Bongani Ndlovu, Showbiz Correspondent
The Zimbabwe Music Rights Association (Zimura) should consider taking up the Sony Music Entertainment Africa model for collecting and giving artistes royalties.

The new application has a real time cash out feature for the convenience of artistes.

Payments for musicians under Zimura are quite strenuous as artistes have to wait for a year for them to collect their revenue. Usually, they get their payments around this time of the year.

According to Sony Music Entertainment Africa, the two new features — Real Time Earnings and Cash Out, allow artists to view and withdraw earnings faster than ever before through the Sony Music Artist Portal.

During these extraordinary times where artists need immediate access to funds, the Real Time Earnings element of the Sony Music Artist Portal is available anytime, anywhere and provides artistes with immediate updates about their global earnings and account balances while also giving them faster insights into their earnings trends.

The Cash Out element gives artists even greater control over their money by providing them with the ability to request a withdrawal of all, or part of their payable balance and there are no hidden fees or charges that are incurred when doing so.

The Sony Music Artist Portal also allows artistes exclusive access to performance data and insights from digital services like Apple Music and Spotify that report their consumption patterns on a daily basis.

Through this feature, artistes get to know their fanbase from an analytical perspective.

Sean Watson, managing director of Sony Music Entertainment Africa said: “The high level of transparency and efficiency in these tools is aimed at making doing business between us clearer, faster, simpler and more direct for our artists and partners and it comes at a time when we all need as much of that as we can get.”

It is innovations like these, born out of rapidly advancing technologies, which will ultimately shape the way the music industry does business going forward.

Zimura can take a leaf from Sony Music to give real time access to artistes collecting their music royalties. One does not need to wait a year to get their money as the money is losing value each passing day.

Artistes could get their royalties from radio stations weekly or monthly when the money still has value.

In these Covid-19 times where money is scarce for artistes, it is vital that they get as much revenue from their music as possible and a real time cash out for their earnings will be very convenient.