Bar successfully defends its playing of royalty-free Creative Commons music in Spain

When a Spanish bar decided to get around the paying of music licensing fees by playing only Creative Commons licensed music, the Spanish collecting society Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) tried to sue. Last month, the court ruled in favour of the bar, recognising for the first time that it's possible to use music outside of the repertoire of artists managed by the collecting society.

See press release: Spanish court recognizes for the first time that there is music that is not represented by collecting societies.

This is significant because collecting societies around the world rely on the default position of their managing 'practically all' commercially-released artists. Therefore you normally have to buy one of their blanket licenses even if only using one or two of their artists. This effective monopoly is good when it works - providing a fairly low-administration way of being able to license the majority of music at a reasonable rate - but really bad when it doesn't work, forcing artists to agree to their every term and condition or else not receive any of their distributed royalties. Artists who want to allow some free usage of their music - for example non-commercial or educational - yet still receive royalties for commercial usage, are currently unable to be accommodated within any of the collecting societies' schemes.

The established practise of these collecting societies also breaks down when the internet comes into things. This is because the collecting societies only manage national rights, whereas the internet is global. The societies have tried to move forward on this front by setting up reciprocal arrangements whereby they can sell licenses including each others' territories, but it's currently still a bit of a mess.

One glimmer of hope, though, is that the reciprocal arrangements currently set up for internet streaming radio use a fixed individual charge (per track per stream) rather than a blanket fee. Whilst this is terrible in that it imposes a baseline cost for each listener you receive - leaving you with the difficult task of needing to make your income increase at a higher rate per-listener than your costs - it does mean that you can effectively cost-save by playing music which is explicity outside of the repertoire managed by the collecting societies.

In short - every Creative Commons licensed track you play means that you save a bit of money. You can also oddly save money by playing really long tracks, as the rate is fixed at per-track regardless of track length.

Collecting societies will increasingly find themselves losing the power that comes with being the de-facto copyright manager for all music, and so if they don't change to catch up with the times (as Creative Commons are encourages), Creative Commons music will get more attention as bars, radio stations, hairdressers, doctors surgeries, and so on all try to avoid paying the music license fees that they're meant to pay.