Riding the Third Rails: Making the case at WIPO for performer streaming remuneration
Photo: © 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. […]
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Redundant Injustice: The Senseless Firing of Opera Australia Musicians
By Bruce Ridge (originally published on the ICSOM website)
As Bill Bryson noted in his book In a Sunburned Country, life cannot offer many places finer to stand than Circular Quay in Sydney. The glistening panorama of Sydney Harbour and the stunning Harbour Bridge is anchored by one of the most recognizable and iconic buildings ever imagined, the Sydney Opera House. The Opera House was designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, whose dream faced constant criticism, delays, and political attacks that would lead him to resign his post in 1966, never to return to Australia, and never to see his greatest creation. […]
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Music Against Child Labour Competition: Winners Revealed
The results of the MACL Competition were announced on June 10th, on the occasion of the World Day Against Child Labour event, in the context of the International Labour Conference.
In 2021, the ILO, JM International (JMI) and FIM organised the first-ever Music Against Child Labour competition on the occasion of the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour. The competition invited professional and amateur musicians to submit songs that raise awareness and encourage listeners (governments, social partners or the general public) to stand against child labour.
Running from February to May, the competition received entries by artists from over 50 countries in all regions of the world, submitting more than 200 songs. […]
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Press release | Social dialogue in the live performance sector
Press release | Brussels, 10 June 2021
Strengthening social dialogue in the commercial live performance sector
Faced with major challenges during the pandemic, workers and employers have been pulling together. Fresh research finds that the crisis situation led to stronger cooperation between different actors in the commercial live performance sector and has even created new connections where there were none.
The European Social Partners in live performance – Pearle* on the employers’ side and EAEA (FIM, FIA, and UNI MEI) on the workers’ side – have been working together to map the situation of social dialogue in the commercial live performance sector in five countries: Bulgaria, Czechia, Poland, Romania, and Serbia. […]
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22nd FIM Congress | New Governing Bodies
On 25 May 2021, the 22nd FIM Congress elected its new Governing Bodies.
The new Presidium consists of the following persons
President: John Smith (United Kingdom)
Vice Presidents: Ray Hair (United States), Edith Katiji (Zimbabwe), Anders Laursen (Denmark), Beat Santschi (Switzerland), Horace Trubridge (United Kingdom)
The new Executive Committee consists of the following countries
Australia, Austria, Canada, Costa Rica, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Norway, Romania, Senegal, Sweden, Uruguay
EU | Collective bargaining for self-employed workers
For many years now, FIM and its partners FIA and UNI MEI, have been attempting to convince the European Commission to exclude self-employed workers in our sector from the field of application of article 101 of the TFEU. The aim of this article is to prevent price-fixing agreements between companies in order to protect consumers.
The DG Competition (COMP) now recognizes that protecting consumers does not justify depriving the most exposed workers of collective protection. With this in mind, in January 2021, it published a document prefiguring a future impact study. Based on the comments it received (including those from ETUC and EAEA), it opened a consultation to which all interested parties were invited to reply by 28 May 2021. […]
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EU | Risk prevention in the audiovisual sector
During a webinar on 14 April 2021, professional bodies in the European audiovisual sector –FIM, FIA and UNI MEI for workers, CEPI and IFFPA for employers– presented the new interactive risk assessment tool (OIRA) dedicated to audiovisual production sites.
Run by UNI-MEI, the webinar essentially targeted representatives and professionals in the European audiovisual sector. Davide Gianluca Vaccaro, who coordinated the development of this tool for two years, presented a technical description. Roger Sutton contributed to this development work for FIM.
Like other tools in the OiRA family, this is available free of charge (in English) on the EU-OSHA website. It is comparable to tools already operating in the live entertainment sector and works from an office computer, tablet or smartphone. […]
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