Netlabels vs GEMA

- free art
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revy
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Post by revy »

i looked at the GEMA website, but im still a little confused, what is the main benefit of joining GEMA or any collecting society?
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DJ L'embrouille
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Post by DJ L'embrouille »

sad news. is it the person or the name of the project/band/artist which is subjected to this tax ? perhaps it's possible to use different names for different project : one for free stuffs and other for commercial ones...
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Post by idealstandard »

revy wrote:i looked at the GEMA website, but im still a little confused, what is the main benefit of joining GEMA or any collecting society?
Guess it's abit the same as in France so i'll try to explain it: the GEMA (or SACEM) in France are paying the artists royalties when their tracks are played on radios. Which is sometimes very few money.
They're also protecting the copyrigts of the tunes.

And i guess that's all i can tell right now :wink:

To L'Embrouille: bonne idée tiens! But i don't think that the tracks are protected on the base of the project name but on the base of the artists name...

Oh and i've just seen on the GEMA website that podcasting isn't free anymore in Germany since the people must buy a license (first price 10 Euros) for each show selling for less than 300 euros a month (i.e the free one as well)
Nice times we're heading :(
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Post by Pebbles »

hm, is in fact a bit confusing.. i also wonder what the use of gema is.
can't you act without them?
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Post by idealstandard »

Pebbles wrote:hm, is in fact a bit confusing.. i also wonder what the use of gema is.
can't you act without them?
http://www.gema.de/engl/press/gema-komm.shtml

... but i'm no sure if this will help since it's quite, erghh... :?
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sebastianh
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Post by sebastianh »

Pebbles wrote:hm, is in fact a bit confusing.. i also wonder what the use of gema is.
can't you act without them?
yeah you can act without a collecting society, no problem...
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patrick bateman
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Post by patrick bateman »

revy wrote:i looked at the GEMA website, but im still a little confused, what is the main benefit of joining GEMA or any collecting society?

The main benefit is that you as an artist get royalties from each record produced (!!), and besides that you get royalties when your tracks are played on radio, tv and so on, plus when you play a live gig (not dj, but live acts), at a club/festival what ever, you can fill out a gema live set sheet of what tracks was played, and the club then have to sign this, and then you get a royalty fee for this liveshow too.

But besides that Gema sucks so hard for small labels. We're paying almost 0.5 euro per record produced to GEMA (imagine how much money this was for our Trentemøller release :? ). Most of these money should go directly to the artist, but they ofcourse take a fee for the handling :lol:

And they surely don't know what they're doing. Some artists I know is registered go for free, other times we pay for one release and the next is for free, and so on and so on. Really 'funny' to see how that they really don't know sh!t about what they're doing, but they love to watch everybody's back all the time and loves to hunt people down.......


I think that if there were a better deal for small labels doing less than 1000 copies, then it would be great. The good thing for an artist is that he will get some kind of money from the release via GEMA, even though the release might not break even for the label, and therefore they can't pay the artist any money.


@Pheek, did you ever get some royalty money from the TTT005 ?
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revy
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Post by revy »

hm thanks for clarifying.

that is really too bad that they are going after netlabels. it really should be ultimately up to the artist him/her/self how their tracks are licensed. if all gema artists are blocked from releasing free music there are lots of great experimental tracks that will never see public release :(
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