Pop stars lobby commission to protect their royalties
LEIGH PHILLIPS
03.07.2008 @ 17:45 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Stars from the realms of pop, rock, opera, and cinema - including Bee Gee Robin Gibb and soundtrack composer Patrick Doyle - came to Brussels on Thursday to try to convince the European Commission's competition tsars that there is such a thing as too much competition when it comes to changing the rules about who collects royalties on musicians' behalf.
Musicians are worried that changes to the system of collecting societies will have a negative impact on songs in minority languages (Photo: Heiko Junge / Nobel Peace Center)
The commission is currently considering whether to put an end to the national monopolies held by collecting societies.
These are the agencies that collect payments for the right to play tunes. They gather these royalties from entities as big as commercial radio stations and as small as the corner hairdressing salons that puts on a steady rotation of Julio Iglesias hits on the stereo for its customers to enjoy.
Currently, there is one such society for each national jurisdiction. The commission however, according to a series of leaks, is believed to be favouring a decision that will open up this process so that the different collecting agencies will be able to compete for each others' business.
Some five years ago, content providers RTL and Music Choice complained to the commission that the collecting societies constituted cartels. The firms argued that their multi-territorial licensing process is to complex and cumbersome.
The musicians, however, are horrified at the commission's plans and warn that such a move will drastically cut their income as agencies compete on offering the lowest price.
The artists underlined that whatever the system, it makes little difference to the bigger stars as they would still be able to command large sums for their works.
They said instead, the change would particularly hit independent artists, those just starting out and, most worrying for a Europe where all member states are supposed to be equal, singers who produce works in minority languages.
The pending commission decision "risks creating major difficultuies for smaller [collecting] societies who represent less mainstream [artists]," and will reduce "the volume of business to support their own local writers," the musicians argued in a letter to President Barroso.
Some 227 other artists, including filmmaker Pedro Almodovar and pop singer Paul McCartney also signed similar letters.
Competition is the solution?
Mssrs Gibb and Doyle, along with Laurent Petitgirard, a French symphony and chamber music composer, and David Ferguson, a British writer of music for film and TV, met with officials from the commission's competition department and Antonio Jose Cabral, an advisor to commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
There, they tried to convince the officials of an alternative option in which authors and the directorates-general covering culture, the information society, the internal market and enterprise and industry sit down and hammer out a solution that overcomes the complexity of multi-territorial licensing in the digital age while protecting the income of artists.
They say they want all the relevant EU departments to sit down at the table because they believe that the commission's culture and internal market departments are more understanding of their position that the "market fundamentalism" of the commission's competition watchdog.
"The EU has to understand the difference between business and the production of culture," Mr Gibb told reporters in Brussels.
"DG Competition [the commission's department dealing with anti-trust and monopoly issues] perceives competition as the sole solution to every problem and is trying to prejudicially brand the authors' societies as 'monopolies'," the musicians said in the letter.
"Collecting societies "should not be compared with conventional businesses since their role is to simply collect and distribute money from the licences to their members – the creators," the letter continued. "They are not-for-profit collectives of authors and publishers, and a product of civil society, not commercial imperative."
"Hundreds of thousands of small- and medium-sized businesses - both writers and publishers – are likely to be wiped out," they said.
The commission's competition spokesperson, Jonathan Todd, said following the meeting with the musicians: "There was a lot of common ground."
Mr Petitgirard conceded: "I believe the commission is hearing a little bit of what we are saying."
However, he added that if the final decision is indeed to end the collecting societies' monopolies, "We will declare war!"
He suggested that the artists will simply pull their catalogues – effectively going on strike – and not allow anybody to play any of their music.
"We can wreak havoc," agreed Mr Ferguson.
Mr Todd said a decision by the commission is expected before the end of July.