SWA rejects SUISA's new license fees for music in online campaigns

SUISA's new license fees for music in online commercials are causing displeasure.Unwelcome mail from SUISA: since the beginning of this year, the collecting society has been charging advertising clients steep licensing fees for music in online campaign commercials or on microsites. What was previously available at a flat rate of 100 to 200 francs now costs many times more. SUISA now wants advertisers to pay up to a whopping 3.3 percent of the online media budget to music authors as "making available". To this end, clients would have to send their confidential media plans to SUISA, which would then calculate the license costs on this basis. If the music is not played during the entire spot, the percentage is reduced accordingly - a time-consuming process that in many cases the agencies have to take over for their clients and also means a lot of manual work for SUISA. All this at a time when digital advertising in particular is being planned, booked and optimized more and more automatically. For the Swiss Advertisers' Association (SWA), this is completely incomprehensible, disproportionate and impractical, and it is particularly disturbing that the same compensation in favor of authors in television and radio is borne by the broadcasters. Now SUISA wants to enforce a different system on the internet of all places and directly prosecute the advertising clients. For a moving image campaign of CHF 100,000 with continuous music, this means additional costs of CHF 3,300 for copyrights alone. The advertising clients have already commissioned and paid a composer in good faith for the creation and use of music for an advertising spot, and SUISA's behavior has offended the entire advertising industry and above all annoyed the advertising clients. The collecting society failed to negotiate these new license prices with the industry in good time and to inform them about them. As the exploitation of online rights is subject to free competition throughout Europe, SUISA has not yet been forced to negotiate at all. Nevertheless, SUISA would be dependent on good cooperation with the advertising industry, also in the interests of the composers it represents, and together with the SWA, the associations Leading Swiss Agencies (LSA), Allianz Schweizer Werbeagenturen (ASW), Interessengemeinschaft Elektronische Medien (IGEM), IAB Switzerland and the Goldbach Group have opposed this proposal in recent months. Unfortunately, the collecting society has so far been unwilling to abandon its complex process and high licensing costs at the expense of advertising clients, which is why the SWA decided last week to reject these new licensing costs and the impractical process. At the same time, the Association expects SUISA to seek a solution with the platforms that technically distribute the commercials on the internet for compensation for making them available. The SWA is also prepared to work towards such a solution and has held initial talks on this. For the SWA, it is undisputed that the authors of music should also be fairly compensated on the Internet. However, as in TV and radio, such a licensing model must start with the broadcasters or the platforms and not with the advertising clients.