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Business News Labels & Publishers
German publishers call for larger cut of streaming income
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 23 April 2015
The German Music Publishers Association has come out against the way streaming income is currently split between record labels and publishers, it may surprise you to learn. I mean, assuming you’re surprised by most things. Even unsurprising things.
Speaking at the trade body’s annual meeting yesterday, President Rolf Budde said that “composers, lyricists and music publishers must not be sacrificed on the altar of digital music”.
According to Billboard, Budde told the meeting that German publishers were increasingly worried about the amount of money coming to them via the country’s performing rights society GEMA. This, of course, echoes similar protestations made by publishers, songwriters and their trade bodies in the UK, US and elsewhere in recent months.
Budde told the room: “It is high time that streaming services with their ‘gold rush’ mentality stopped ignoring creative people and jeopardising their livelihoods. The streaming services do not pay adequate compensation to the authors and publishers via GEMA. The streaming services and the record companies must give authors and music publishers a fair share of the revenues once and for all”.
Of course, some might say that the publishers really should have thought about all this ten years ago, rather than signing up to deals akin to the CD model where labels take a much bigger slice of income. Others might say publishers are actually already seeing a bigger cut of streaming income compared to their share of CD and download monies.
But, hey, let’s just start with a clean slate, shall we? If this is something that needs fixing, how is that going to happen? The streaming services have already made it clear that they can’t afford to give up any more of their revenues to the music industry. Though, admittedly, Tidal is seemingly saying it can. But if publishers and songwriters are going to see a serious uplift in streaming income, that will likely require the labels to take less. Why would they ever do that?
As previously reported, this will be a topic of discussion at this year’s CMU Insights @ The Great Escape, where representatives of the labels, publishers, songwriters and more will debate how the digital pie should be chopped up. More info here.
