News

The Global Repertoire Database (GRD) – the project that will catalogue the world’s music – has announced that it will set up its global headquarters in London and will base its operations centre in Berlin.

The London office, housing corporate functions and business development capabilities is scheduled to open later this year, and will work alongside the current London-based project team in the first instance. The Berlin operations centre will provide registrations and data processing facilities, and may provide a template for further operations centres to support the global operation as it grows.

The GRD is a global, cross-industry collaboration to deliver a single, comprehensive and authoritative representation of the authorship and control of musical works worldwide.

When completed, the main benefits of the GRD will be to create a new and more effective global infrastructure for music rights management, leading to an improved path to music licensing for digital and other music services, and to efficiency benefits for the whole music ecosystem saving extensive costs currently lost to duplication in data processing.

GEMA finished the 2012 business year with a satisfactory result. The sum of the returns for copyright holders from all over the world was €820.2 million. Although this represents a decrease of about 0.6 percent, or €5.3 million, compared to the previous year, income overall has remained at a high level.

The cost unit rate increased slightly to 15.6 percent, compared to 14.9 percent in the previous year. The share of mandates for collection on total income amounted to €175.0 million. Both positive and negative developments could be seen in GEMA’s different sources of income. At a glance, GEMA’s most important sources of collection income

Q&A with Véronique Desbrosses, General Manager of GESAC.

It has been a busy few weeks for GESAC, with the CRM Directive now gathering pace as the summer approaches. What update do you have on this?

At this advanced stage, we really are getting into the detail of this piece of legislation. The four technical committees who were selected for consultation have now drafted their opinions, so we have an overview of the direction they are heading in on this.

Overall, what we are looking for now is a compromise that serves the interests of all stakeholders, while adequately safeguarding the interests of authors and composers. We trust that Marielle Gallo, who is steering this piece of legislation through Parliament, will be able to work through the various amendments that are being made and piece together a text that is both pragmatic and effective.