Our streamfair campaign
Streaming has become an increasingly important part of the global music market, with many using digital services like Spotify, Deezer, Tidal and YouTube to consume music.
With our Streamfair campaign, which launched in 2015, we aimed to raise awareness of this change in the music landscape, and its impact on songwriters and composers.
The campaign viewed the challenge from four perspectives
- Copyright legislation
- Online licensing
- Promoting music value
- Awareness of music value
Copyright legislation
Copyright is the mechanism that enables our songwriters and composers to make a living from their work. A strong, healthy and sustainable music industry needs a legal framework that ensures creators get paid fairly.
We’ve been supporting the need for legislative reform for several years, to ensure creators' rights are protected in a digital market. Safe harbour provisions, originally introduced to protect technology companies, are now being exploited by some digital services to build multi-billion pound businesses. This broken market is depriving creators of fair value for their endeavours and undermining legitimate music services.
We've been active in the debate on the modernisation of copyright legislation: shaping conversations with policy-makers, influential thinkers and government to ensure music rights are valued and protected.
Online licensing
We support dynamic and legitimate online businesses and want them to thrive. Our Streamfair was launched to celebrate this innovation and encourage collaboration.
We're proud of our track record in licensing businesses as quickly and effectively as possible. Our commitment to providing efficient licensing solutions has led to the creation of our cross-society online licensing and data processing hub, known as the ICE.
We support the online market in its drive to offer the greatest possible access to music but not at the expense of the songwriters that created it.
Promoting music value
We are part of a global creative industry, representing over 125,000 songwriters, composers and publisher members and the works of millions more worldwide.
From grassroots creators to the more established, and across every genre, our members’ music is increasingly discovered, loved and streamed online. At the time of launching Streamfair, 50 percent of the global music market was derived from online music sales.
We’ve always understood that this fast-paced environment provides new challenges for our members and we want to provide clarity around the issues so they can make informed choices throughout their careers.
Awareness of music value
Music isn’t free. Through Streamfair, we wanted to educate people about the streaming market and help people understand that those making music should be recognised for their work.
We appreciate that the choices for online music discovery can be confusing and felt it important to help people understand the different digital music services – and commend the ones that value the music that drives their business.
Can you imagine a world without music? The future of an important UK industry is at stake. To ensure there is a sustainable ecosystem for music makers, music providers and music lovers, we want people to stream their music fairly.
