Music streaming
While music streaming services offer valuable means for music authors to reach more audiences, many music creators cannot make a living from streaming. ECSA proposes several measures to fix streaming and improve the situation for music authors. See the position paper for more.
News
On 15th July 2021, UK’s Parliament’s committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published the report 'Economics of music streaming'. Following the inquiry that started in October, the DCMS Committee recommends an impressive number of reforms to fix streaming, not only to redress the balance for songwriters, performers and composers, but also to tackle fundamental problems within the music industry. Amongst other recommendations, the report suggests to:
- refer the major music companies to the Competition and Markets Authority to study the economic impact of the major music companies’ dominance;
- implement copyright reform similar to what is contained in the European Copyright Directive, articles 17-22 c) undertake a review of how music metadata is administered and require that Black Box unattributable royalties are distributed so that they support creative talent.
ECSA congratulates its British Member, the Ivors’ Academy and its partners for achieving such an outcome through the #BrokenRecord campaign.
On 19th October the UK Competition and Market Authority (CMA) announced that it will launch a market study on music streaming. This comes as a result of the inquiry of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Committee of the House of Commons and the campaign of ECSA’s UK member the Ivors’ Academy of Music.
ECSA welcomes this step which will look into the market dominance of the major music groups, which control the majority of the recording and publishing markets. The Alliance also encourages the EU and other countries to conduct similar studies and bring positive changes and meaningful revenues from music streaming to music creators.
Working Group on Music Streaming
The scope of the Music Streaming Working Group is to address all the most relevant issues for composers related to streaming. At ECSA, there have been plenty of discussions as well as a position paper about streaming in the past but the need to solve issues related to streaming and the composers’ world is still present. ECSA’s Music Streaming Working Group will elaborate on concrete solutions to improve the remuneration for music authors.