With the unprecedented boom of the Philippine music industry over the years, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) has intensified its engagement with music artists to equip them with the knowledge and means to leverage their copyright, protect their artistic legacies and sustain the rising global wave of Philippine music.
In line with this, IPOPHL recently held a public consultation to develop a Toolkit for Filipino Musicians on Managing Copyright. It would serve as a vital resource on the fundamental copyright principles in the music industry to strengthen artists’ capacity for IP management.
The public consultation is a major activity of FlipMusic Productions, Inc. under its consultancy engagement with IPOPHL for the Toolkit for Musicians project under the Copyright Plus Program. Through this consultation, insights, grounded in real industry experiences and concerns, were gathered to ensure the toolkit reflects the language, practices and lived realities of contemporary Filipino musicians and music artists.
The development of the toolkit is a timely boost to the Philippine music industry as it experiences an unprecedented boom, with Filipino music content on Spotify growing fourfold over the past five years and the emergence of popular P-Pop acts like BINI and SB19 drawing greater global interest to Original Pilipino Music (OPM). This boom is also driven by increasing access to legitimate avenues for digital streaming for both creators and consumers alike.
During the consultation, talks shed light on how common it is for starting musicians to sign a record without fully understanding the terms of a contract, the concept of ownership in music, how songs generate income and how rights are protected.
Participants also raised how the knowledge gap extends even to established musicians, particularly in administration, royalty collections and the role of collective management organizations, which could serve as one-stop shops for managing and enforcing the IP rights of artists.
The outcomes of the consultation highlighted the critical need for a resource like this comprehensive toolkit for the industry.
“This toolkit is part of our broader effort to cultivate a more enabling and future-ready IP ecosystem for the Philippine music industry. By grounding policy support in the real experiences of our creators, we ensure that our interventions are responsive, inclusive, and aligned with how the industry actually works,” commented IPOPHL Acting Director General Nathaniel S. Arevalo.
Jeli Mateo, Chief Executive Officer of FlipMusic, envisioned the toolkit to be an “evolving document,” assuring participants that the consultation will ensure that the toolkit will be more responsive “and lead to the creation of a resource that is not only informative but genuinely useful for artists at different stages of their careers.”
Dr. Fernan R. Dizon, Officer-in-Charge Assistant Director of IPOPHL’s Bureau of Copyright and Related Rights (BCRR) delivered a message on behalf of BCRR Director Emerson G. Cuyo highlighting the toolkit’s potential impact in “strengthening copyright awareness, promoting responsible rights management and supporting sustainable and thriving careers in the Philippine music industry.”
The Toolkit for Filipino Musicians on Managing Copyright is a project under IPOPHL’s Copyright Plus Program 2.0, an expanded series of initiatives aimed at raising awareness of copyright among under-resourced creators and helping them realize its economic and cultural benefits through registration.
