CISAC
CISAC 2020 Report: Global Publishing Collections Fell 10.7% Last Year
That 10.7% overall decline for music, however, was “considerably less disastrous than was foreseen one year ago,” as Oron observed, while TV and radio — still the largest sources of income for collection management organizations — declined less than expected due to a resilient economy. At the front-end of the COVID-19 pandemic, CISAC was anticipating a 25%-30% decline in collections for 2020, based on estimate reports then from member organizations, Oron tells Billboard. As well, “digital collections have managed to mitigate the fall in other income sources in many countries,” Oron said. “The surge of digital collections globally is a tribute to the efforts of CISAC societies to change strategy, shift resources and step up digital licensing activit...
CISAC Completes Upgrade of Music Coding System
CISAC, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, has centralized the assignment and administration of International Standard Musical Work Codes (ISWC). Previously, those codes, which already have been assigned to 52 million song compositions, had been handled by a network of 54 registration agencies in 79 countries. The ISWC administration switchover began in July with over 100 collection management organizations now participating in the new system, according to CISAC which commissioned Spanish Point Technologies to develop the new registration scheme. The rest of the publishing community and digital music platforms are expected to roll over to the new ISWC system shortly. “The upgrade of the ISWC could not come at a more timely moment for songwriters and compo...
ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus Named President of CISAC
Björn Ulvaeus, a co-founder of ABBA who wrote the group’s hits with his bandmate Benny Andersson, was today (May 29) named the president of CISAC, the global confederation of authors societies. Known for his business-savvy, as well as his interest in technology, Ulvaeus steps into the role at a time when Internet companies and collecting societies are learning to live with one another but still have very different views on how streaming services should work and what they should pay creators. “I tend to think that creators get too little, of course, because I’m a songwriter, and I think that in the long run we have to take a closer look at how things are divided,” Ulvaeus told Billboard over Zoom before his appointment became official. “It all starts with the song, as far as I’m concerned. ...
