Disturbed harmony

WW: Swiss media musicians feel underpaid. Are you too badly organized?
Adrian Frutiger: There is, or rather was, a long-standing competition between composers for commercials and feature films. An already small group was divided once again. That was also practical, one could, if one wanted, play us off against each other. Today, however, there are many musicians who work for both genres. Together we want to make ourselves heard more. In December 2012, we founded our new association with this in mind. All genres are represented in the Professional Association of Swiss Media Composers: Feature film, commercial, jingle and game composers.

How many members does SMECA have today?
Lysander Gelewski: There are 43 of us. We estimate the number of all full-time or part-time media composers in Switzerland at 200.

Is the association a suitable instrument?
Gelewski: The subject of usage rights and commission fees for media music is very complex. That's why it's viewed positively by the entire communications industry to finally have a competent contact. We have united all media composers under one roof and can now formulate our interests together. This includes representing the media composers to two target groups. On the one hand, there are the collecting societies, especially Suisa, Swissperform and SIG. The other target group is the producers' associations. As a third goal, the SMECA association wants to promote the work of media composers, which we achieve through networking, workshops and information dissemination.

The Internet has developed into an uncontrollable playback field. What does this mean for composers?
Lionel Vincent Baldenweg: On the web, we come off relatively badly as content creators. Our music is used very often and intensively. But we get little to nothing out of it. The people who are supposed to represent us in this regard have simply not yet been able to agree on a clear common strategy.
Roland Schmid: The Internet has been around for almost 20 years. But the collecting societies have still not managed to define a tariff for this medium. It took years of negotiations and legal disputes to reach an agreement with Google, for example, for uses on YouTube.
Frutiger: At least in the last few years, the development became foreseeable, and it is just a bit lazy that there is still no plan at Suisa for a fair compensation of music on the net.
Baldenweg: SMECA would like to make budgeting easier for our customers, i.e. producers and advertising agencies, in the future. For this purpose, guideline values are to be created and recommendations made. Then an advertising agency can count on a precisely defined amount for the music in its budgets right from the start. New standard contracts are also a major concern for us, because they would benefit the entire industry.
Frutiger: Our customers pay very high media fees. As composers, we should actually also be compensated with minimal royalties. But that doesn't apply to the web yet.

Should new money come in or just redistribute the existing?
Gelewski: New money, because there is no actual online rate at Suisa yet. Getting to grips with the new reality is very difficult. The development is rapid. But Suisa continues to work with age-old tariffs that were designed for completely different music uses. This leads to huge discrepancies between expenditure and revenue.

You are dissatisfied with the compensation system. Where does the money go that is withheld from you?
Gelewski: Of the approximately CHF 7.5 million that Suisa collects annually for advertising spots in SRG programs, 15 percent is deducted as administrative costs. 10 percent goes to social welfare and cultural promotion. Then - and this is the bone of contention - Suisa takes 20 percent of the royalties and allocates them to music use in other television programs. The numerous foreign series in particular benefit from this. This means that we have to do without 45 percent of our royalties and thus more than 3 million a year.
Baldenweg: And in addition one must still specify: The 7.5 million are not all for Swiss composers. This is the sum for the entire SRG advertising pie with spots and thus for composers and music publishers from all over the world.

How can music on the Internet be measured? After all, we're already seeing the problems with the debacle with TV usage figures?
Schmid: I maintain that large media agencies know exactly which target group clicks how much. Keyword targeting. The customer will only invest money if the success of a campaign can be measured. That's why measuring reach is not the problem.
Gelewski: We are not actually dependent on how many people see or hear a spot from us. According to copyright law, the decisive factor for remuneration is how much the advertiser has paid for the placement of his spot. This is called the "work revenue" or the "work expenditure". The only thing that matters to the advertiser is how many contacts it generates. We, on the other hand, are interested: Did the client pay 1,000 or 100,000 francs for his campaign?
Baldenweg: If no online tariff comes into effect, composers will be forced to raise their prices. As long as media budgets were not yet so heavily invested in the online sector, it was still possible to measure relatively clearly what came back from SRG and other TV stations in the form of copyright fees. You could evaluate quite precisely how much you could invest in a spot as a music producer. Now that the fees for classic media are decreasing and nothing or almost nothing is paid for online use, we lack the basis for reasonable planning. The commission fees in this day and age rarely cover the personnel and studio expenses to be able to realize a production at the desired level.
Schmid: That was always the argument of the spot producer during fee negotiations: "You'll still get a lot of money from Suisa afterwards." Due to the redistribution of royalties within Suisa and the lack of adequate tariffs in the online sector, this no longer applies.

Are the musicians too much artists and do not care about their concerns?
Schmid: This is an important part of the problem. Taking care of one's copyrights means a lot of administrative work. Most creative people and especially musicians are busy with their ideas. From that point of view, we certainly missed out on some things. We should have intervened proactively earlier.
Baldenweg: We are poorly protected as musicians and have had to accept very large losses in recent years. Copyright revenues have dropped by 20 to 40 percent in advertising and between 30 and 70 percent in film. And that was the money we needed to invest in new productions, software and studios. So it's about the economic existence of a small but important professional group in the audiovisual industry.
Schmid: Suisa rejected all our requests at a meeting today. It seems that they do not understand or do not want to understand the industry-specific concerns of the media composers.

What are your next steps?
Schmid: Continue to negotiate, lobby, present the image of Swiss media musicians as it is, and get away from the complacent artist as a lone wolf. There are also possibilities to proceed further in court - with a fight all the way to the Federal Court. A small group of advertising composers led by our vice-president already won such a lawsuit against Suisa five years ago. But that costs a lot of nerves and money. We could put that to better use. A third possibility that we are seriously considering is the establishment of an autonomous collecting society.

Interview: Andreas Panzeri