26.6.2006
Swedish musician union launches a sales service for its members
Sydsvenskan reports how the professional union of Swedish musicians,
Musikerförbundet, is opening a new payment service to help its members to sell their music directly from their homepages.
The union is tired to see its members being fooled in royalty payments by the record companies. "The Swedish musicians do not get as much as they should from the record companies", says Musikerförbundet's Jan Granvik. "It is very hard to keep track of the royalty money streams. The industry has built an unbelievably complex system, and the musicians are constantly cheated. They are an easy prey as they are the only ones in the business who do their work because it is fun - all the other parties are there just to make money."
The union is presently running an inspection on Swedish record company Mariann. A number of artists suspect they have been cheated in Mariann's royalty payments. Such inspections are rare though as they are costly to organize. Therefore Musikerförbundet has chosen a new strategy: the artists can now handle the selling of their music themselves.
The union invested 500,000 Swedish crowns (50,000 USD) to new software that can handle the sales of audio files, t-shirts and CDs so that the items are sold from the various homepages of the artists but the money transactions are handled centrally by the union itself. Both credit card and mobile phone payments are accepted. The money goes first to Musikförbundet which then passes it to the artists. The system will be immediately helpful for unsigned artists; most signed artists will not be able to use the service right away because they have given exclusive sales rights of their albums to their record labels. This does not worry Jan Granvik. "Only by setting up an alternative system can we attract a larger number of musicians."
Musikerförbundet hopes that their new service will help to turn things back into right track. "This is our way to face both the threat of illegal filesharing and the threat of unethical businessmen.", says Granvik.