| > Why can't video be like music? Music is still fighting being “like music”. > Spotify and Apple Music aggregate pretty much all the music in the world now. There have been a number of recent media reports about how exclusives, which never were absent from streaming music, are playing a bigger role now. > You don't have to sign up Warner and Sony and a thousand other labels to play music. Well, yeah, we haven't gotten to the point of the content owners taking their ball and going home in music yet, we’re in more the Netflix and Blockbuster bidding for exclusives phase when it comes to music. But we know where that ends up. > Moreover, all the music is licensed through a single IP rights licensing system. No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses, so you don't usually have to deal with individual content owners. But no one is putting the ki d of money into an album they do into a major motion picture and hoping for that kind of return, so video (at least the top tier) isn't going to look like that. |
> No, it's not, it's just that public performance licensing has a small number of agencies that most artists are affiliated with, and offer blanket licenses
At least in Germany we have a single agency (GEMA) that acts on behalf of virtually all artists worldwide. They are responsible for a range of licenses, be it for bands that want to cover a song on their new album, a bar that wants to play music or a music streaming service that wants to get started.
In my experience it is a tremendous help to have a single entity for licensing that even has ready-made rates for most things.
I don't see a reason why this could not exist for movies as well. Cost-intensive productions can easily be reflected by tiered pricing so that it costs more to stream/show Jurassic Park than some independent movie.