The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) reported 9.6 billion euros (currently $10.30 billion) in global collections for 2022 and expressed the belief that “we will lose the next Paul McCartney” if we do not take further steps to “make life fair for creators” in the streaming space and in other places.
CISAC, whose members are 227 companies (net decrease by one unit as a result of the withdrawal of CIS from Russia and others) from 118 countries and territories, disclosed the total amount of fees and other noteworthy information in its recently published annual report for 2023.
The previously mentioned 9.6 billion euros represents a modest improvement over the 9.32 billion euros ($9.99 billion) in fees that CISAC indicated in the annual breakdown for 2022, but the total has not yet recovered to about 9.65 billion euros ($10.35 billion) in fee reports. for the pre-pandemic 2019.
Drawing on statistics, CISAC in this latest report highlighted its efforts in 2022 to streamline operations and maximize collection in emerging markets, where data shows streaming is becoming increasingly popular.
“Can we get another Paul McCartney?” wrote CISAC President Bjorn Ulvaeus. “I hope we can, but it will only happen if we make the streaming world a fairer place for content creators today. There’s so much to fix. Let’s all get together and do it.”
And as for actually achieving these fixes, the 78-year-old founding member of ABBA reiterated his position: “We need to accelerate the work to fix the metadata problem so that the works can be correctly identified and their creators are fairly paid.”
“Now we have gained real momentum in this regard. The updated ISWC from CISAC has become more widespread and is used by publishers and DSP, and new joint projects come from societies,” wrote Ulvaeus, whose organization is said to have expanded its “ISWC Resolution Service” to 11 publishers.
Designed to allow said publishers to match their own databases with the CISAC ISWC comprehensive offering (filling in the missing information in the process), the Problem Resolution Service processed 3.6 million applications during 2022 and 1.5 million during the first quarter of 2023 alone, according to the Paris-headquartered division.
Similarly, 22 publishers use CISAC’s “Distribution Service,” which assigns ISWC “as soon as the publisher receives the title and a list of songwriters with their IP name numbers,” according to the document. According to CISAC, 432,000 ISCW were allocated last year with the help of this tool (which was implemented by nine societies).
As for the progress in fundraising in specific countries and regions, CISAC pointed to the 16.4 million euros ($17.59 million) that Greek AUTODIA is said to have received in 2022, an increase of 68 percent over last year and north of a staggering 4,000 percent since 2017.
“AUTODIA believes that Greece remains an inefficient market with significant potential for further growth,” CISAC writes. “Fees could double and exceed 30 million euros [$32.18 million] over the next few years.”
Meanwhile, the organization with almost a century of history also touched on the seemingly encouraging first results of the Turkish MSG and MESAM, which were excluded from CISAC in 2021 and re-admitted in June 2022. In addition, India’s IPRS, which was re-admitted at the end of 2018, is reported to have doubled its membership in the meantime (to about 9,000) and improved fees by about 525 percent to about 35 million euros/37.55 million dollars.
