We’re still trying to avoid the term ‘post-pandemic’ as Covid-19 is far from eradicated. But we can talk about a bounceback from the early, sharpest impact of the pandemic – and that’s been shown very clearly in the financial results of several collecting societies.
Sacem in France; PPL and PRS for Music in the UK; GEMA in Germany and ASCAP in the US are just a few we’ve written about recently showing strong comebacks and even record collections. Today we can add two more to the list: STIM in Sweden and SGAE in Spain.
STIM’s annual report showed its highest revenue ever: SEK 2.7bn ($248.6m at current exchange rates) which was year-on-year growth of 20%.
The society’s payouts to its songwriter and publisher members were 2.2bn SEK ($202.6m), up 16% year-on-year.
STIM hailed a 21% increase in international collections from other societies around the world, as well as a 213% increase in live public performance royalties, which are now back to their pre-pandemic levels.
Neatly, in time for its 100th anniversary, STIM has crossed the 100,000 mark for membership – it now has 102,238.
In the report, STIM chair Carina Brorman warned that the organisation needs to be “humble about the huge challenges society faces in terms of war, energy crisis, climate crisis and recession” and their potential impact on its revenues.
Brorman also cited specific music challenges for STIM (and by extension other collecting societies) including “the DIY generation, where many people fail to register their music and thus miss out on remuneration for their work”. AI is also on the society’s radar.
“If we look specifically at the music industry, I see AI and copyright as perhaps the biggest issue to address. After many years of hard work, we have a new copyright law in place in the EU, which is a great victory. Now we need to look at AI and other services with auto-generated content from a copyright perspective.”
As for SGAE, the Spanish society saw its collections grow by 35% to €348.9m ($379.5m) in 2022, marking its highest revenues since 2007.
The organisation distributed €316.3m to its members, up 27.4% year-on-year. It now has a membership of 132,515 songwriters and publishers.
Like Sweden, Spain is seeing a strong comeback for collections relating to live music: they were up 112.7% to €30.2m in 2022. SGAE also reported strong growth from streaming (up 45.6%) and video-on-demand services (up 63.6%).
“Our goal is to continue improving our results, especially in the digital realm, and to increase efficiency in the distribution of authors’ rights, with greater transparency towards our members,” said general director Cristina Perpiñá-Robert.
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