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Collective digital licensing back on the MIDEM agenda – will it come to the UK?

By | Published on Wednesday 27 January 2010

The aforementioned MIDEM panel involving BPI boss Geoff Taylor also discussed the previously reported French government report which, among many other things, advocated collective licensing for digital music, so that record companies would have to licence their music to digital services through a collecting society in the same way they licence radio and public performance. 

As previously reported, French Minister Of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand told MIDEM this weekend that his government would now give the country’s record industry a year to voluntarily come up with a plan for collective licensing in the digital domain, and if they failed to do so that he would force such a system on them.

Patrick Zelnik of French indie Naïve and indie-label trade body IMPALA, who co-wrote the French report, was also on this panel. According to Billboard, he told the session that collective licensing would “simplify access” to the digital music market for new and innovative service providers, increasing competition in the sector, to the benefit of consumers and content owners alike.

Noting that “the industry has failed to build a digital market in the last ten years”, he said we needed many more new service providers to expand and solidify the digital market that is now slowly emerging, and that it was wrong for the major labels to pursue a licensing system that stopped many of those new providers from entering the market (mainly because the majors tend to demand large upfront fees as part of any licensing arrangement, something collective licensing would not allow).

Taylor reportedly argued that there would be “no call” for such a “regimented, regulatory system” in the UK, because, he argued, “the digital market is functioning very well” here. I suspect those operating the more engaging of the digital music services would not concur, most of them having long term business plans that rely on a dramatic reworking of the way music companies licence their catalogues.

While it is true the UK’s digital music market has grown much quicker than in France – that market is still reliant on a handful of operators living off venture capital funding which will one day run out. Both they, and the many great grass roots start-ups currently unable to enter the legitimate market at all, would really benefit from some sort of collective licensing system. And long term, I increasingly think such a system would be in the wider music industry’s interest too.



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