The meanders of SACEM
02/23/2007 | 0 comment(s) | E-mail this article | Comment this articleIn this end of month of January, my interest is worn on France and its SACEM. Does the Society of the Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music wish to deprive its members of diffusion?
Our team decided, some weeks ago already to put some of my most recent recordings in pre-listening and downloading, this for free. The legal jungle of internet has considerably slowed down the project of online bet and well changed our plans.
Wishing to make discover works of the French contemporary repertoire, we have collided with the problem of the authors which are members of the SACEM. Far from criticizing the royalties, I oppose three things here:
- The prohibitory prices practised by the venerable institution
- The image of the authors resulting from the management of this society
- The total dispossession of the rights of the author
To put online my recordings, I must fulfill of course the royalties. But the SACEM does not make any difference between lucrative and non-lucrative goal... If we wanted to reach the initial project, this site would be a real ruin.
Let us give a small example. Let us suppose that we wanted to put the sonata for piano of Henri dutilleux online. The site would owe then, according to the arrangements of the SACEM, to pay a tax of 100€/year + 0,07€/download for free downloading, as well as a package of 100€/month for pre-listening. The simple sonata of dutilleux would cost therefore something like 1400 € per annum, and it, even if Mister Dutilleux gave us a free licence, he would have to pay himself to the SACEM his own royalties, having given these up to the SACEM.
There were two solutions: being in the illegality, and not paying anything, or setting up a system of payment for this function of the website, generating a surcharge of 200€/month for the secured banked system. Neither the first, nor the other one have not been kept, the first for evident reasons of not depriving a composer of his rights and the second because it completely went out of the frame set at the beginning. The simplest solution was therefore not to put online the members of the SACEM, to publish only French authors that have fallen in the public domain.
Shame, everybody always talks about lack of diffusion of the Contemporary Music, for once it is possible to use a medium fast and mass, the institutions supposed to defend us, prevent us in our own interest.
The institution makes also to pass its members for spiteful miserly and stingy artists. Nevertheless this image, the authors would manage their career well without it (cf this article). As you see, the SACEM generates comic situations, like an artist forced to pay rights on his own works! Fortunately, France does not have the monopoly of the good music, and in other countries, this kind of society do not possess the exclusiveness of the rights, it is therefore possible to negotiate directly with the composers.
The word of the end would be therefore: Do not play French music now, wait 70 years after the composer's death!. The French music will have always at least 70 years of delay in the media unless one makes the legislation evolve, isn't it Mister Petitgirard?
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