APRS CONSTITUTION

Mark Broad explains the development of the Association's Board Constitution

From its very beginnings over fifty years ago, the Association - then known as the Association of Professional Recording Studios - looked to its rank and file members as the dynamo of its activities and aims. However, for practical purposes, the voices of individual members needed to be channelled and merged into a common voice. The medium for this process was the executive committee, a small group of individuals who were selected, through a democratic voting system, to represent the interests of the membership at large, and who themselves picked one of their number to be chairman both of their meetings and of the Association.

The system required would-be members of the executive committee (who satisfied certain criteria) to put their names forward at an annual meeting. Those elected would serve for three years, but could be re-elected, as indeed many were. This added significantly to the committee's collective knowledge and experience. In essence, it is the same system that provides the Association with its present-day Board.

As the APRS became more of serious commercial force, the style 'Board of Directors' replaced the old 'executive committee' - although those committee members had always, in law, been 'directors' ever since the Association became a limited company in 1951).

The original post of the (voluntary) Secretary to the committee grew into a paid, though initially part-time, job. Later it developed into the full-time position of Secretary General, which in turn has become Chief Executive.

With the expansion of the range of membership of within APRS (later to be reflected in its change of name to the Association of Professional Recording Services), the composition of the executive committee was broadened to provide for the proper representation of sectors other than the professional recording studios on which it had been founded.

1990 saw the formal creation of a separate membership group for pressers and duplicators (PAD), followed by record producers (Re-Pro), a section for manufacturers, hire companies and consultants (the Suppliers Group) and, in 1997, APPS for audio post-production facilities.

As these groups, together with the 'core' Studios Group (now Accord), evolved and grew, provision was made to ensure that the board always included one or more directors (the numbers varied over the years) to represent the interest of each sector. Thus, the constitution of the Association continues to enable the voice of all members to be heard in the process of policy-making, while allowing the objectives and decisions of the Board to be conveyed downstream to the members of every sector by their own elected representatives.

Through it all, the directors have no special privileges. Being a member of the Board is an unpaid and often onerous job. We should be grateful that there are still men and women in our industry prepared to put themselves forward when those elections come round each year.