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Music Stars Take Copyright Fight To U.S. As Revenue Tops $10 Billion

This article is more than 4 years old.

Music, video and other artists are earning a record $10 billion in royalties a year — but they are not letting up on their fight for a fairer share of digital income. The worldwide publishing group Cisac, which released the figure today, hailed European plans for copyright reform that were approved in April and urged the government in the U.S., the largest music market, to follow suit and ensure that services such as YouTube pay more to creators.

While the total figure for songwriter and author royalties collected by authors’ societies around the world showed a modest 1% rise in overall incomes, the digital revenue surged 39%, according to the Cisac 2019 Global Collections Report.

For years, musicians as diverse as Paul McCartney, Adele, Annie Lennox, Jean Michel Jarre and Nikki Sixx of SIXX:A.M. have urged “fairer payments,” saying that many millions of internet views are needed to generate significant income. Book, film, news and music publishers also want to ensure their material is not easily pirated.

“Digital is our future and revenues to creators are rising fast, but there is a dark side to digital,” CISAC’s president and electric music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre said in a statement. “It is caused by a fundamental flaw in the legal environment that continues to devalue creators and their works.” He urged all countries to adopt the European Copyright Directive: “It has sent an amazing, positive signal around the world, building a fairer balance between creators and the tech platforms.”

Uploaded content platforms “will not be able to take advantage of laws that were not meant to protect them in the first place and they will need to negotiate like any other digital service,” Gadi Oron, CISAC’s chief executive, said in an interview. “A lot will depend on how European member states will implement the new principles that the directive established and the big challenge is to export these principles also to markets outside the European Union.”

Royalties from digital sources jumped 29%, thanks to rapid global expansion of music and subscription video on-demand services, according to the new report covering the last calendar year. Digital accounted for 17% of all collections, with the most significant growth in the US, France and Japan. This growth is helped by new and extended licensing deals between societies and digital platforms, from dedicated content services like Spotify to social media platforms such as Facebook and video on demand platforms such as Netflix and Amazon. Global collections for music, accounting for the majority of the total, rose 1.8%.

Sixx and others have said the lack of income will ultimately make it very difficult for new artists to make a career from music. They have blamed Google’s YouTube especially, while Google has repeatedly responded that it is doing much to boost income for artists. The European Parliament’s directive has also been condemned by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, and the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who fear it will stop freedom of speech and make illegal even user-generated photos and harmless memes.

Paris-based Cisac, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d’Auteurs et Compositeurs) has 239 member societies, which represent more than four million creators in 123 countries.

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