“Great Consolidator of Mechanical Rights:” Founded in 1927 by its namesake who worked for the Music Publishers Protective Association, The Harry Fox Agency (HFA) has for decades been the nation’s leading provider of rights management, licensing and royalty services for the music industry. With over 48,000 music publishing clients, the New York-based HFA issues the largest number of mechanical licenses for the use of music in both physical and digital distribution formats and offers a wide range of licensing, collection, distribution and royalty compliance services to its affiliated publishers. HFA also presents publishers with licensing opportunities for new products and services to help maximize the value of their publishing catalogs. CEO Michael Simon says, “HFA is committed to transparency and the demystification of what many ‘civilians’ often view as a complicated process. As an expert in licensing, HFA is interested in making licensing more effective and efficient for its publishers as well as music distributors.”
Tech Innovator: The organization leverages rights management expertise and state-of-the-art technology to create market driven licensing and royalty administration solutions. As a technology innovator, HFA is leading the industry in establishing global data standards and is a founding member of the Digital Data Exchange (DDEX).
Accelerated Rights Management: Slingshot (http://hfaslingshot.com) was launched in late 2009 to help digital music providers manage the licensing process. It includes a suite of information management and tech solutions designed to streamline the end-to-end licensing and royalty process for music and entertainment companies including record labels and digital distributors. Slingshot’s goal is to accelerate market entry for clients and allow them to focus on their core businesses. Clients include many of the largest digital streaming services in the U.S.
D.I.Y Friendly: HFA serves the D.I.Y. market with Songfile (http://songfile.com), the company’s fast and easy-to-use online mechanical licensing tool that allows the public to search through millions of songs and purchase licenses. Songfile may be used to obtain licenses for physical and digital formats such as permanent digital downloads, ringtones and interactive streams. Users pay a low per-song processing fee and royalties for licenses, which are set at the current U.S. statutory rate.
