Tag: CISAC
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Unison admitted to Cisac as rights management entity

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

Spanish company Unison has been admitted to collecting societies body Cisac as a ‘rights management entity’ (RME) – only the second company to do this.

The news means Unison will get access to the tools that Cisac’s member societies use, but the news is also significant for its symbolism: a badge of approval from the body representing the societies that, to some extent, Unison is disrupting.

Well, it certainly is in Spain, where the official society SGAE has had some well-documented troubles in recent years, including a temporary expulsion from Cisac in 2019.

Unison currently manages rights in more than 800k works for its members, and has been banging the drum for blockchain technology via a partnership with Verifi Media.

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Covid-19 to ‘wipe out’ five years of songwriter royalties growth

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

Good morning! It’s us again, bringing you a whopping serving of bad news. Well, there are positive things in global collecting societies body Cisac’s latest annual report too, for last year, but the organisation makes it abundantly clear that the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on musicians is far from just a 2020 thing.

Start with the good: global music collections grew by 8.4% to €8.96bn ($10.52bn) in 2019. Within that, there were healthy rises for collections from digital sources (up 27.2% to €2.05bn) but also growth from the traditional heavyweights of TV and radio (up 4.5% to €3.32bn) and live and background (up 5.6% to €2.62bn).

Global music collections have grown by 24.7% over the past five years, but Cisac warned that this trend is “certain to be sharply reversed in 2020” due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In its announcement of the report, the organisation doubled down on this: “The losses of 2020 – for music only and for all repertoires combined – are set to wipe out five years of growth since 2015.”