Artistic Remuneration for Online Content

Debate between Pete Wishart and Thangam Debbonaire

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Lady is right. Making records and producing albums seems to be a loss leader for all the other activity that musicians are now expected and ordered to do to try to ensure that they are able to make a living from music. She has seen the figures from the Musicians’ Union that suggest just how depressed is the average musician’s income. I cannot remember the figure, but I am sure she knows better than I do that it is significantly low. That is a real issue for so many struggling artists. I am an unrecouped artist. I sold about 1 million records, but I have never received a penny for any of the records I sold when I was signed to a major record label. There was an expectation that we would make money from all this other activity. I concede that we did relatively well, but we did not do well from record sales. There is something incredibly wrong with the marketplace.

Streaming might be an opportunity for us to consider how we properly reward musicians for the works they produce. I am attracted to the 50:50 concept of the Musicians’ Union. Let us work towards recouping the investment that rights holders and record companies make in the artists, but let the artists start to earn a little from streaming services. Artists earn an absolute pittance from streaming services, and we should at least allow them to make that pittance a little more substantial.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

The hon. Gentleman is making some excellent points. Does he agree that the online industry’s domination of the income—it is keeping so much of the income and allowing the artists so very little—is equivalent to the person driving the van full of CDs having most of the income and the artists having very little? The online platforms are the vehicle. They are the last bit of the process between creation and consumption. Does he agree that it would be better if we tipped the balance back towards the creators, without whom the industry as a whole would be nothing? We need creative people and the creative industries that support them in getting their output recorded.

[Pete Wishart]

There is very little on which I would disagree with the hon. Lady. We must restructure that relationship, but I caution her and others. The music industry in this country has a successful business model, and we are world leaders. We produce the artists and ensure that they are supported. I have nothing against record labels and the music industry investing in that talent and bringing it on in the usual paternalistic way. That is what happened when I was a recording artist, and the model is still successful. Rights holders should be properly rewarded for their investment in artists.

That brings me to my next point, which is probably the most substantial point in all this. Several Members today have raised the issue of safe harbour, which we have to tackle; of all the things that the Minister takes away from today’s debate, I hope that it will be that one. Safe harbour is a useful innovation, because it has encouraged a number of people who were tempted by piracy and illegal sites to come across to a legal framework where they are able to access some of the content.

The music industry’s suggestion of distinguishing between active and passive safe harbours is a useful one. We all know what a passive safe harbour looks like: that is where people find a store of music, access it and do all the usual things. But when it comes to the manipulation of that music and to designing things in a particular way to try to create some sort of income for it, we get into the realm of an active safe harbour. At that point, royalties should be paid, to ensure that something comes back to rights holders and artists. I very much support copyright being extended to what could be considered as active safe harbours.

I am also attracted to the idea that streaming sites should be treated pretty much as a radio player—we heard about that from the hon. Members for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), and it is a feature that we should be looking at. When I access Spotify, for example, I mainly use the radio services. I still do not see a distinction between listening to the radio in the morning and listening to the radio service on Spotify—I think they should be treated the same.

I am conscious of time and am obviously very keen to hear from the Minister, but I have a couple of things to say about where we find ourselves after the decision we made a couple of weeks ago about the European Union. The fact that we will not have access to the European Union is an absolute and unmitigated disaster for the musicians of this country. We will now be excluded from most of the debates about the digital single market, which is one of the biggest innovations in the placing of content online that we have ever seen in any part of the world. We have now taken ourselves out of that conversation about the structuring of the digital single market. That is a disaster for musicians in this country. I am not going to mince my words about this.

Another issue related to remuneration for artists that we will have to consider carefully is free movement of people in the music sector. One of the great innovations in the music industry in London is that we can draw in so many creative people who have so much to offer our industry—