2 May 2013

PRESS RELEASE: Nordic Stars Form New Constellation

A new constellation of stars has seen the light of day in the Nordic area. The three collecting organisations Koda, TONO and Teosto have formed the “Polaris Nordic” alliance which aims at reducing costs and further enhancing the quality of their business.

The future role of Polaris Nordic is to develop and run a joint back-end system for music reporting and distribution of the revenues collected by the organisations. The first two systems, Polaris REP and Polaris DIS are in the pipeline and are expected to be used by all three organisations by the end of 2013. Koda, TONO and Teosto are among the world’s most efficient and lean collecting societies, and the aim is to further reduce their costs by working together and using the same system.

Koda CEO, Anders Lassen, says: ”For many years, the Nordic collecting societies have been working closely together in an informal network. It is time to take that collaboration to the next level. By using the same back-end system we can also uniform our processes and structures and thereby creating even more value for our rightsholders.”

Aside from developing a common backend processing, Polaris Nordic will negotiate deals for all three societies – e.g. regarding IT investments and services such as work-databases etc.

“In a world where we are facing increased competition for rights, it is of the utmost importance that we can prove to the rightsholders that we are frugal and capable of joining forces to the benefit of our members and rightsholders”, says Teosto CEO Katri Sipilä.

Polaris Nordic is currently a virtual organization which draws on resources from all three societies as well as on external resources, but the vision is to expand the collaboration to other societies as well.

“Working together on the processing side will be a “must” for us in the coming years. Our authors and publishers have an expectation that we continuously strive to distribute as much to them as we can possibly do. In a world where digitalization is reducing the revenue, we see cost reduction as the way in which we can differentiate ourselves. We strongly believe that rights holders will judge our societies by how lean we are and how much we can deliver to them. Polaris Nordic will be one of the tools to achieve this”, says TONO CEO Cato Strøm.

FURTHER INFMORMATION
Contact Nicolaj Hyltén-Cavalius, Head of Communications – Koda.
+45 33 30 63 09
nhc@koda.dk

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