OCC seeking license payments from non-profit radio?

Keybasher

New Member
I came across an interesting channel on Mixcloud where someones lockdown project has evidently been running through old charts and counting them down. While I find it a bit overkill to countdown two or three full charts a day, they obviously seem to be having fun.

However it appears they've had the money men at the Official Charts Company knocking at their door demanding £10,000 to license their data for use on their show. If the guy who runs retro records or anyone from OCC reads here, any input would be welcomed.

I'd understand this for a business venture or commercial radio station. However this is non-profit stuff - like most of us are involved in - but many people on here will listen to or even present shows that use official chart data - or even casually just put the data in between playing normal songs on their shows as talk padding. The full statement from the Radio Station is quoted below.


We are not permitted, apparently, to use or link to data owned by the Official Charts Company from today, without purchasing a rather costly licence from them. This is not possible, so we will no longer reference the Official Charts Company, or their licenced sources, ie Guinness Book of Hit Singles. However, we are fully licenced to play the music, so the shows will continue. The Official Charts Company do not own the music, or the order in which it is played, but we will not refer to their data as published on their web site. We therefore can broadcast records in any order, which may or may not, correspond to a published list of songs in existence.

One good thing, the source we will use does not have TIED chart positions, which is a bonus as far as presentation is concerned. The important thing to note is that the only real change to the show will be removal of the reference source as the OCC, with no more links to their data.

As we are non profit radio, we don't see why they would try to charge us £10,000 to use their data, so it's easier and cheaper simply to use alternative sources.

I suppose I'm half posting this to ask for support but mainly asking, will this change the way you refer to OCC based data (even if it's from a secondary source such as Wikipedia) in shows going forward, or would you be cagey about running a Top 40 show?
 
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