July 17, 2017

PRS for Music reported in its M-Magazine that, in an open letter, the shadow secretary of state for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport urged all the European committees due to meet to vote on the proposed Copyright Directive to tackle the issue.

He wrote: “The value gap is the mismatch between the value obtained by digital service providers, such as YouTube, from the use of music on their platforms and the revenue returned to the artists, composers and businesses that created the music.

“User-upload streaming services such as YouTube pay only a fraction of the royalties of other music services despite being the most popular source of music consumption by far. This significantly reduces the amount of money composers and performers receive for their creative endeavours from user-upload streaming platforms when compared with other services such as Spotify and Apple Music.”

Mr Watson added: “I urge you to support amendments [in the proposed Copyright Directive] that improve the UK and European music industry’s ability to tackle the “value gap”. Article 13 of the proposed Directive has been designed for these purposes.” To read PRS for Music’s article in M-Magazine, click here. To read Tom Watson’s letter in full, click here.