Foreign music authors are missing millions from Russia

Reputation turned out to be more important than money

The results of 2022 were not very encouraging for foreign authors who receive payments from Russia for their music. According to reports from the Russian Copyright Society (RAO), foreign copyright holders received slightly less than twenty-one million rubles, although a year earlier their Russian profits exceeded one hundred and thirty-one million. This drop in income has its own explanations.

According to the copyright law, contributions to RAO are required to be made by television channels, radio stations, studios producing films and TV series, as well as those areas of business where background music is used: restaurants, clubs, bars, hotels, gyms, and so on.

According to official statistics, contributions to RAO for 2022 are generally similar to the figures for 2021, however, total payments to Russian and foreign authors have decreased. However, the most noticeable trend was a sharp reduction, almost six times, in payments to foreign copyright holders.

Many explain this situation by the significantly increased share of Russian music. There is some patriotic optimism in such an assessment, but the popularity of the local product is little compatible with the level of royalties to foreign music producers. The trend itself, according to which there has been increased interest in Russian music, appeared before 2022. Even in peacetime, the share of our artists in streaming reached seventy percent, and the events in Ukraine did not become a trigger here.

At the same time, the radio market, whose royalties are a significant part of the author’s pie, has not changed radically. There is still a lot of foreign music on the local airwaves, it is clearly not from China and India, and in any case they must pay for its use regularly. But doing this has become not so easy.

“After the start of the SVO, the physical sending of money abroad was frozen,” a music law expert who wished to remain anonymous said in an interview with MK. — In the spring of 2022, a settlement mechanism with so-called unfriendly countries appeared. Now RAO, like any other organization, must send money to a special account “O” from where copyright holders can take it, and it is clear that the main ones belong to the countries of the NATO bloc. True, in order to receive copyright, you need to express either loyalty or neutrality to the current position of Russia. In this situation, reputation for Western copyright holders is much more important than money, and that is why the share of royalties reaching foreign authors from unfriendly countries has decreased several times.”

It is quite difficult to give an objective assessment of such a situation; after all, copyright holders have never before been divided into friendly and unfriendly. Now even courts in controversial situations seem unlikely. The most striking signs of the new musical era for Russia are the numerous posters advertising symphony concerts at which hits by Western stars will be performed.

Projects like this used to require the approval of the music’s original artists. But now an obvious conflict of interest is unlikely to come to court in Moscow, or even less so in London. A kind of irony is that the copyright is not hidden. They are simply in no hurry to take them away in the current situation.