GEMA strikes again…
This is getting ridiculous.
I don’t even know what to say about this.
They really like to kill the golden goose.
that’s… unreal?
like i can’t even respond intelligently my mind is just completely blown, i can’t fathom what’s being said there could possibly happen in the real world
stealing a reddit comment on this, as it applies here as they just copied the fact article
“This translation is garbage. They’re actually removing the existing 30% flat surcharge and instead adding the per-track fee. Also this isn’t about laptops, but rather sound files - so switching to a flash drive or whatever won’t work. Furthermore the author seems to have no idea who Tanith is which discredits him even further. Yes, it’s a huge problem, but also this article isn’t even telling close to the full (or even real) story. FACT need to get their facts straight.source: I’m german.”
so if I don’t use a laptop I’m unaffected by this? I can pretty much dj on anything, laptop, vinyl, CDJs. So I could basically just burn all my stuff to cd and use the local CDJs without having to pay? where is the fucking logic in this?
edit: damn, ninja’d by xone
hey xone, can you perhaps explain to me in german, I’m not sure I’m getting what you mean
not my comment, I don’t speak german
taken from here: Reddit - The heart of the internet
nvm I found the german article on tanithblog. 13 cents per song is ridiculous
btw: this “battle” isn´t just berlin vs. gema. the new gema rules will affect the whole country. every club, every bar, everything that plays music to he public. and it´s getting worse day by day. we can only hope that they´re not getting through with all the nonsense they´re about start next year.
it is pretty damn ridiculous, even with the tanith revelation! no way that this can go through at all
It’s a legal government backed Mafia. There is no better way I can describe the GEMA.
scamo
TBH if the price is 13c per track the money is not the thing that would bother me @ around 2.50 euro per hour (which could be factored into fee’s anyhow)
Moreso the issue I have is the administration, which essentially means your DJ set has to be orgainized like a radio station so they can break them down correctly.
Now while that is not necessarily an issue for those on Traktor or VDJ perhaps most of the time I for one will let a track bleed on the fader slightly as a loop maybe, which WILL add to a the “played tracks” even if I were previewing.
Now in Ableton it becomes more of an issue, where I would be playing samples etc .. unless there is some kind of cutt off point which says “song has been played” … e.g. 90 seconds needs to be played before qualifying for payment.
Hip Hop and button mashers no doubt would be more pissed - perhaps though we can get back to playing 5 whole minutes of a decent track rather than 5 bad tracks in one minute which IMHO is not necessarily a bad thing.
Not an issue that effects me currently, but i’m watching it as other countries could/might easily follow suit if its uncontested in Germany.
that’s pretty shitty of them to do that. If you play your own productions do they pay you that much? 
GEMA are a royalty collector, similar to PRS in the UK. So hopefully this means dance music producers can actually earn some money from their tracks being broadcast in a public place?
Before you get pissed off about GEMA, think about the artists that will benefit from this.. Also think about how much you payed at the bar and on the door of the last club you went too..
However I don’t understand the laptop surcharge..
Surely it cant be .13 cents a track, I think that info must be wrong.
From the article
“Earlier this year we reported that Berlin clubs could face closure as soon as January 2013 because royalty fees were being raised to an extortionate degree by German organisation GEMA”
No one would bat an eyelid at .13 cents a track, it has to be something REALLY high.. If a track gets played on a good radio station the artist will earn anywhere between £30-£100 in the UK. So I’m guessing it must be in big figures.
I just hope the artist see’s something out of it.
I fear it could go the oposite way Clubs will close DJ will demand bigger pay from the clubs or not want to play. Less dance music being played so less money for the artists. because people don’t listen so much to radio anymore and with no clubs to go to where are they to hear new music.
It’s ok that you have to pay to play music in public but it not ok that you pay the price of the track several times after a few gigs.
How are they going to police/monitor this exactly?
i have a feeling that a lot of this money is going to get sucked into “administration costs” and the artists will see very little. These guys aren’t doing this so they can help artists make more money, they’re looking out for themselves.
that would be if the GEMA paid each of their members equaly but that’s no the case. most small electronic music producers are, what they call “attached members”, the lowest kind of membership in the GEMA but also the biggest in numbers (over 60000). the power and most of the money lies with the “regular members” and “extraordinary members” which in comparison make up a very small amount of all the members (around 3500).
so chances are high that if you pay more money to the GEMA you are sponsering some guy from Modern Talking rather than your small time techno producer.
The unknown story behind GEMA, BMI, ASCAP et rest is that the commissions are not paid per track, rather distributed based on the most common songs played out there. In other words, if you are Elton John, Lady Gaga, Journey, Abba et rest you get nice checks. If you are a very unknown producer that actually has the track played a lot, good luck getting any royalties.
At least most national radio stations keep track of royalty payments per artist so that’s one glimmer.
This will not be fixed until the sorry saga about digital music tracking is solved. In other words, all music tracks should have a unique ID imprint either as part of the digital audio bits so you can’t rip it out or otherwise marked. And SW will track what is played and report back. Doubt that will ever happen.
[QUOTE]Before you get pissed off about GEMA, think about the artists that will benefit from this.. Also think about how much you payed at the bar and on the door of the last club you went too..
[/QUOTE]
This fee is on top of the already increased fee’s that clubs will pay to publicly broadcast music which caused uproar earlier in the year with a moderate size club averaging a 200k “licence” cost per year.
I believe this new “licence” cost is in leu of that fee being shot down somewhat.
These agencies however IMHO should be government run as opposed to being allowed to operate as basically un-auditable and unanswerable to anyone apart from themselves.
They can pay lots of people to spot check venues with all the royalty fee’s that will be paid to them - win win for GEMA… I wonder how much power the government are going to give them hmmmmmm.
AFAIK its based on listeners, so perhaps on the BBC or something with millions of listeners the rate would be that high. It certainly isn’t for independent stations with a few thousand listeners… a club would probably fall even lower than that and is already paying x amount per year anyhow - 13c per track is not outside the realms of possibility and in a commercial club could amount to over 5k per year on top of whats already being payed by the club per year.
However, I’m guessing this “license” is going to encompass not only DJ’s, but the likes of background music in bars as well.