During its biennial conference on the 23 and 24 July 2013, The British Musicians’ Union celebrated its 120th anniversary in Manchester, where it was created in 1893. This particularly brilliant event was an opportunity, for Europe’s largest musicians’ union with over 30,000 members, to denounce once more the British government’s radical disengagement from all its missions of a cultural character and its devastating effects on musical life in the country. This historic cultural regression is astutely described on the http://www.lost-arts.org website.
Another particularly iniquitous initiative from the Cameron administration is currently being actively opposed by the BMU and its partner BASCA (British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors): in February 2013, the British government announced the setting up in the UK of an exception for private copying without compensation for rightholders, contrary to almost all national instruments implemented in the rest of the European Union and in clear-cut contravention of article 5-2b of Directive 2001/29 CE which establishes the principle of equitable compensation for rightholders. Claiming that zero compensation can meet the requirements of equity established by community law is pure provocation. By depriving rightholders concerned of their legitimate revenues, this measure places all the national music sector in an unfavourable situation with regards to other Union countries, but also despoils all European creators of the remunerations which they should be able to claim on the UK market. The BMU reminds people that the great majority of its members does not earn more than £20,000 a year and that the rights linked to the various uses of their recordings constitute a vital source of revenue for them.
Generally speaking, the sharing of value imposed on artists by the industry with regards to online uses seems increasingly out of line. In particular, the fact that streaming services by subscription such as Spotify can get round the equitable remuneration regime and thus keep musicians away from the profits generated is clearly intolerable. It is essential today that a solution be found to update laws at community level and ensure that contractual practices evolve. This is now a priority for FIM and its European partners.