Chairman of TONO and the Norwegian Composers' Association, Jørgen Karlstrøm, answers Anderz Døving in the organizing organization Klassisk about TONO remuneration and the prize for the music.
/ 16/09/2020 / Kristian DugstadThis post was published in Ballade on 16.09.20: The Originators – The Constant Balancing Item
The CEO of the organization Klassisk, Anderz Døving, has in recent days written editorials in Klassikampen and Ballade in which he believes that "TONO encourages people to abandon contemporary music". This is of course not true. TONO's goal is that the right to use music should be easily accessible to those who want it, and that those who have created the music should receive a fair payment for the use. We are grateful that organizers use, and want to use more of, our music.
Read Andrez Døving's post in Ballade: TONO – the music collection center
Read more: Reply from Ålesund Chamber Music Festival about TONO fees
On Monday 21.09, Klassekampen and Ballade published composer Therese Birkelund Ulvo's contribution to the debate. Read it here: Collection agency? All day.
TONO is a private cooperative owned and managed by Norwegian composers, songwriters, lyricists and music publishers. Anyone who creates music and has the rights to it can become a member of TONO. TONO pays out the money that comes in to its members and rights holders abroad, after the costs of collecting it have been deducted. TONO as a company keeps nothing for itself.
TONO ensures that its members get paid when their music is used. TONO does this by entering into agreements with those who want to use the music, and then agreeing on a price. Some have agreements as a single concert organizer, others enter into large negotiated joint agreements, as the organization Klassisk does under the agreement with the Norwegian Music Council. This provides both flexibility, income for the composers, and the lowest possible costs for the users.
One thing is common to all agreements, however: customers pay for access to all music, and choose what they want to use, whether it's a lot or a little. This is called a "blanket license."
We also know paying for access, a license, from other areas: Movie streaming services where you pay a given price to get access to everything the service contains, no matter how much you use it. Or a plus subscription to an online newspaper: Do you read one article or a hundred a month? The price is the same. The same is true with our music. This is actually also an incentive for more music to be used, because the organizers do not have to pay more if they want to spend more on each event. A solution other than a blanket license would dramatically increase the time and resources TONO would have to spend on licensing in each individual case.
Døving's proposed model would not only give less money to those who write the music, but also a higher price for the organizers. We believe that is not in anyone's interest.
The price paid for music is not a fee, it is a consideration. Simply put, in this context, you can think of it as wages for composers and songwriters, and sales revenue for publishers. In short: the price for the music.
The reasoning has an important consequence: If you want a lower price for the music, then you are in practice working to ensure that those who made it have lower wages..
Composers, songwriters and writers of music lyrics are a low-wage group with an average income of less than 200.000 kroner a year. Most people will pay us for what we create, but we sometimes find that our salary becomes a balancing item when those who want to use our music have to settle their accounts.
It is tempting to ask why Døving even writes newspaper articles about accounting items that constitute less than 2-10% of his members' total budgets.
I don't remember reading any posts directed at suppliers, people or companies behind other and larger items in the organizers' accounts. No, it's probably easier to attack us when we can be caricatured as big, strong and greedy with simple rhetoric. TONO may seem like a giant in the Norwegian music scene, but we are first and foremost vulnerable individual composers, songwriters, authors of lyrics for music and music publishers who are trying to get a minimum of income so that we can write more music.
Døving's motive seems simple: he wants to lower the salaries of composers as much as possible, because then the finances of those he works for will be better. If the motive was not that the organizers would pay less, but to use more music as he writes in several places, then he already has the solution. It does not cost a penny more to fill every concert to the brim with new music than to use the offer as little as he himself writes that some of the members of his organization do.
We are therefore surprised that we are portrayed as a financial burden and an obstacle when each and every one of us is so financially weak, at the same time that what we create helps to continue and keep a musical culture alive, and when the music we create is a prerequisite for concerts to be arranged at all.
Jørgen Karlstrøm – Composer, and chairman of TONO and the Norwegian Composers' Association