FIM

International Federation of Musicians

Subscribe to FIM Newsletter

Online music

Will Page, straw man of the music streaming industry

02.05.2023 Updated on 29.11.2023 Intellectual property, Online music

Will Page on ER1. On 16 March 2023, Will Page (for­mer Chief Economist at Spotify) deliv­ered a pre­sen­ta­tion at an infor­ma­tion ses­sion on the music stream­ing mar­ket, organ­ised by WIPO dur­ing the 43rd SCCR ses­sion. His pre­sen­ta­tion took place in a pan­el on the dis­tri­b­u­tion of stream­ing rev­enues under the title: Equitable Remuneration: Policy Options and their Unintended Consequences. Will Page does not jus­ti­fy putting “Equitable Remuneration” at the cen­tre of the debate. He just assumes that this is what the WIPO Member States want to discuss.

2. To begin with, the expres­sion Equitable Remuneration (ER) in the frame­work of cur­rent SCCR dis­cus­sions is mis­lead­ing. […]
Read full post 

Streaming | Strong mobilisation of performers at WIPO

06.04.2023 Intellectual property, Online music

WIPO side-event 15 March 2023

The 43rd ses­sion of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, which was held at WIPO (Geneva) from 13 to 17 March 2023, was an oppor­tu­ni­ty for strong mobil­i­sa­tion of FIM and its part­ners SCAPR, AEPO-​ARTIS and FILAIE.

Our aim was to obtain sup­port from a max­i­mum num­ber of Member States for the prin­ci­ple of fair remu­ner­a­tion of per­form­ers for the online use of their record­ings. We con­sid­er that this prin­ci­ple needs to be clar­i­fied and for­mal­ly set out in a WIPO Recommendation (or a com­pa­ra­ble soft law instrument).

In order to inform and raise aware­ness in gov­ern­ment del­e­ga­tions, on 15 March at 6 pm, we organ­ised a spe­cial event con­sist­ing of a pan­el dis­cus­sion and a Q&A ses­sion, fol­lowed by a cock­tail and con­cert of Hungarian musi­cians Berci Temesi and Friends. […]
Read full post 

France: Agreement establishing a remuneration for streaming

26.06.2022 Updated on 30.06.2022 Intellectual property, Online music

earphones imageI. Backdrop

The French stream­ing agree­ment of 12 May 2022 is the result of nego­ti­a­tions between musi­cians’ unions, phono­gram pub­lish­ers and their respec­tive col­lec­tive man­age­ment organ­i­sa­tions. It falls with­in trans­po­si­tion into French law of Directive (EU) 2019/​790 and is based on the National Collective Agreement on Phonographic Publishing (CCNEP).

II. Principle

The agree­ment guar­an­tees all artists (fea­tured artists and accom­pa­ny­ing artists) the pay­ment of pro­por­tion­ate min­i­mum remu­ner­a­tions when their record­ings are exploit­ed as streaming.

III. Scope – Beneficiaries

1. Phonograms are eli­gi­ble that come under a record­ing con­tract of French law signed as from 1 July 2022 with pro­duc­ers for whom phono­graph­ic pub­lish­ing is their main busi­ness activ­i­ty. […]
Read full post 

FIM webinar: The Streaming Imbalance

Streaming Webinar Banner

REGISTER NOW!

FIM WEBINAR: THE STREAMING IMBALANCE. New approach­es to per­form­ers’ remu­ner­a­tion.

27 April 2022, 13.00−15.00 UTC | View in your time zone 

In this FIM webi­nar, our four speak­ers will explore dif­fer­ent facets of a musi­cian’s career, analyse the impact of dig­i­tal music dis­tri­b­u­tion on music per­form­ers and sug­gest inno­v­a­tive options to pro­vide them with fair online revenues.

→ Simultaneous inter­pre­ta­tion will be offered in English, French, German and Spanish

→ The floor will be open to atten­dees for an inter­ac­tive Q&A session

SPEAKERS

Kevin Brennan MP UNITED KINGDOM
Kevin Brennan
Welsh Labour MP
Chris Castle Esq. UNITED STATES
Chris Castle, Esq.
 […]
Read full post 

Riding the Third Rails: Making the case at WIPO for performer streaming remuneration

06.07.2021 Updated on 06.10.2021 Intellectual property, Online music

Photo of Chris CastlePhoto: © Brenda Ladd 2013

By Chris Castle1 (orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the AFM magazine)

Law out of bal­ance is no law at all. This is most appar­ent with stream­ing com­pen­sa­tion to musi­cians and vocal­ists, the peo­ple who make the records. Everyone is get­ting rich except them, and there’s a good rea­son for that phe­nom­e­non: The con­trac­tu­al roy­al­ty sys­tem is designed that way. It doesn’t mat­ter if the result was inten­tion­al; the effects are so profound.

Rather than fix­ing the vast num­ber of licens­es, the bet­ter solu­tion is to bring bal­ance to the law. Leverage the exist­ing inter­na­tion­al CMOs like SoundExchange and PPL to col­lect a new remu­ner­a­tion pay­ment from stream­ing plat­forms. […]
Read full post 

FIM Statement on Online Music

23.05.2021 Updated on 16.06.2023 Online music

Adopted by the 22nd FIM Congress on May 21st, 2021

Download the state­ment as a PDF

Since the 2000s, the devel­op­ment of down­load plat­forms, then stream­ing ser­vices, has both con­tract­ed and expand­ed the music mar­ket. However, despite recent­ly accel­er­at­ing growth, the val­ue thus cre­at­ed is not shared fair­ly. Indeed, the per­form­ers whose music cre­ates this val­ue receive lit­tle or no rev­enue when their record­ings are used online with rel­a­tive­ly few exceptions.

The imple­men­ta­tion of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples set out below is essen­tial to, at last, guar­an­tee the pay­ment of a fair remu­ner­a­tion to music per­form­ers for the val­ue trans­fer from their work. […]
Read full post 

Belgium | ONB sentenced for breaching musicians’ neighbouring rights

30.11.2020 Updated on 17.05.2022 Europe, Intellectual property, Online music, Orchestras

Orchestra photograph

In a joint press release issued on 20 October 2020, Belgian unions CGSP Culture & Media, CSC-​ACV Transcom and SLFP-​VSOA wel­comed with sat­is­fac­tion the court deci­sion order­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion by the Belgian National Orchestra (ONB) of video record­ings unau­tho­rized by musi­cians to be stopped.

Negotiations had tak­en place between the orches­tra man­age­ment and unions over the amount of remu­ner­a­tion to be paid to musi­cians in exchange for the trans­fer of their exclu­sive rights. After the fail­ure to reach an agree­ment, the ONB decid­ed uni­lat­er­al­ly to make sev­er­al video record­ings avail­able to the pub­lic with­out the pri­or autho­ri­sa­tion of the musi­cians and their unions, for a lump-​sum remu­ner­a­tion arbi­trar­i­ly fixed at €600. […]
Read full post 

Revenues from audio streaming: the figures don’t add up

25.09.2020 Updated on 03.11.2020 Intellectual property, Online music, Status of the artist

The streaming business model

The fig­ures pub­lished by the indus­try are clear: since 2012, the music stream­ing mar­ket has been pro­gress­ing con­tin­u­ous­ly. This growth is accel­er­at­ing year after year, in a spec­tac­u­lar way. In the United States, streaming-​generated rev­enues for 2019 exceed­ed the total record­ed music mar­ket for 2017 (RIAA data). The trend is the same on the British mar­ket, where fig­ures for 2019 set new records: for the first time, the annu­al num­ber of streams exceed­ed 100 bil­lion (BPI data).

As the stream­ing econ­o­my devel­ops, the ques­tions grow as to the way in which rev­enues are divid­ed between the var­i­ous sec­tor play­ers. Music per­form­ers are not the only ones to ques­tion the eco­nom­ic mod­el adopt­ed by phono­graph­ic indus­try plat­forms. […]
Read full post 

1 2 3
MENU