SOKOJ - ORGANISATION OF MUSIC AUTHORS OF SERBIA
SOKOJ - ORGANISATION OF MUSIC AUTHORS OF SERBIA
HOW TO JOIN SOKOJ
An author or other right holder, who opted for collective management of the rights is obliged to enter into a contract granting to Sokoj the authority to licence and administer copyright and economic rights on his/her behalf on an exclusive basis, as well as to submit the following:
You can sign the contract in person at the premises of Sokoj during the working hours available on the website or you may complete the contract in electronic form:
You can register your works on the Portal for Members and in this case you have to sign the Electronic Service Provision Contract.
Print the contract in two copies, sign it, and send it to Sokoj, Mišarska 12-14, 11000 Belgrade, with the aforementioned supporting documents.
After the verification of the contract, your copy will be sent to the address you provided.
The contract that you as an author or publisher entered into with Sokoj will qualify you to be registered in the international database of authors so that any collective management organisations worldwide will have information of you as the author, a member of Sokoj, and will be able to collect and transfer the fees collected for the use of your works in their territory.
In order to be identified as the author of a musical work, after entering into the contract, you have to register your works:
• online on the Portal for Members
• in person at the premises of Sokoj during the working hours available on the website, or
• you may enter your data online in Registering Works, print, sign, and send to Sokoj, Mišarska 12-14, 11000 Belgrade.
If the Application Form is not properly completed or if any supporting documents are missing, we will contact you. The list of registered and unregistered works may be downloaded from the Portal for Members.
You can register a work only if you have entered into a contract on exclusive transfer of your rights to Sokoj. For registration of a song or lyrics that are not in the public domain (that is not “free work”) under the available documentation of Sokoj, a written consent of the composer or lyricist is necessary.
A musical work is registered by the composer whereas a work with lyrics (musical work with words) may be registered only with the written consent of the lyricist i.e. right holder in the lyrics. The lyricist may register the work only with previous written consent of the composer i.e. right holder in the composer’s work. The author or other right holder may also register someone else’s work if proper documents have been delivered to Sokoj (contract or decision on inheritance) proving the economic rights to the work.
You may submit a sound recording of your work (in Mp3, WAV, AAC, OGG, WMA formats) on the sound carrier or via electronic mail to upload@sokoj.rs. Files have to be named by the title of the work and application date (TITLE-NAME AND SURNAME OF THE AUTHOR-03092020)
As Sokoj performs monitoring i.e. automatic recognition of music being broadcast in national and music TV, you have to submit in the same way sound recordings of previously registered works, and name the files under the work code designated by Sokoj (Sokoj Key) that you will find in the reports on your works on the Sokoj website or in the Individual Calculation of Royalties, for example:
66472462 – WORK TITLE.
The New Portal for Members is being developed offering you to monitor the broadcast of your works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, where you will be able to upload the missing works.
Registrations of works for royalty payments are accepted 60 days from the calendar end of the accounting period i.e. 29 February or 1 March of the current year for calculation and distribution of royalties from the previous year. Due to the requirements of the term calculation plan or the business process, the Board of Directors may set up other terms for closure of documentation, but such decision has to be made and uploaded on the Sokoj website for members at the least 60 days before the foreseen term.
Payment of the fees collected in Serbia (broadcasting, concerts, sale of sound carriers etc.) is made once a year in the period May-June, upon the approval of annual reports by the Assembly, whereas the exact date for each year is announced on the Portal for Members. The payment is accompanied by individual calculations submitted to the authors, with 60-day deadline for submitting complaints, starting from the receipt of calculation.
Payment of the fees earned abroad is made to the authors after the completion of the foreign CMOs calculation processing, and line by line against the usage data supplied and full income received. You will find the list of organisation on the Sokoj website. The fees collected and distributed to Sokoj by foreign organisations are subject to the laws, terms and conditions, and practices in force in the country of collection. To ensure that the use of your works abroad is paid, you can send us the data using the Application form for the use of musical works abroad to international@sokoj.rs.
During the last 70 years Sokoj manages the rights of music authors, lyricists, arrangers, and other holders of copyright in musical works of all genres, with or without words.
