SIAE vs META: it’s happening in Italy

Siae (Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori) and Meta are in a dispute in Italy over royalty payments for music content shared on Facebook and Instagram.

The issue is related to the new EU Copyright Directive, which shifts the responsibility of content publication from users to platforms. According to the directive, to determine an offer, the player (in this case, Meta) must make their earnings transparent.

Siae claims that Meta has not provided them with the necessary data to make an offer for the use of their copyrighted music. Meta, on the other hand, claims that they have made a fair offer to Siae. The situation is complex and has many nuances, and the two sides have not been able to reach an agreement.

The dispute has been ongoing for several months, with Siae taking a strong stance in support of the rights of Italian musicians and artists. The company argues that this is not just about money, but about creating a precedent that will help to prevent the dominance and arrogance of platforms like Meta, which they claim do not offer significant benefits to small and medium-sized artists.

The situation remains unresolved, and Italian musicians and artists continue to watch and wait to see how the dispute will be resolved. In the meantime, Siae has urged musicians not to compulsively replace audio content on social media, as this could result in the loss of content.

Now, the SIAE-Meta affair must be framed outside the dynamic of good and evil, because it has many complexities within it. Let’s try to simplify them.

First of all, the assumption that SIAE offered too little has no basis. SIAE neither offered too little nor too much, simply because SIAE doesn’t have the data to crystallize an offer: Meta didn’t provide it. And this is where the game is played.

The new European Copyright directive, an epoch-making achievement that finally shifts the responsibility for publishing content onto platforms rather than users, is clear: to determine an offer, and therefore a counter-offer, and thus to begin negotiations, the player (in this case Meta) must make revenues transparent, because this is the parameter from which one starts to understand, given the data, the percentage of profit that comes from music.

Example with random numbers: even if Meta had offered SIAE 10 million euros, but music revenues were 4 billion (and this is not known precisely because Meta ignores the directive and does not clarify the data), you understand that it would be crumbs and it would be right not to give in.

The argument that other European collecting societies have found an agreement while Only we in Italy have not! is also contextualized here: it is true that France, Spain, and Germany have found an agreement but in other times, other situations. And, above all, since there is a confidentiality agreement between the individual negotiations, no one can know whether these countries have really found fair agreements or whether they have backed down.

The position taken by SIAE must be supported because it is a great opportunity not only to defend the dignity and rights of our music and our artists, but also to create a precedent that begins to stem this overbearing and arrogant behavior that Meta, offering small change in exchange, has already implemented since before but especially post-pandemic. And without offering any significant benefits in return.

Because while Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok are platforms that, by their structure, generate user loyalty by having algorithms that act in this direction and therefore they potentially offer a great advantage, Meta with Facebook and Instagram is the fair of transience.

Do you really believe that small and medium artists have such a great economic or image benefit from a 15-second story passage? It helps, of course, but it’s not decisive. On social media like Facebook and Meta, coherence of narration and storytelling is rewarded, not a single musical passage because it is inserted into an immense thematic cauldron that does not favor audience loyalty, the only condition to see your business grow, not only in the music field.

There is one thing we need to hope for and it is that the ongoing negotiations are managed with a firm hand by SIAE, that they are tight and without discounts, thus creating an important precedent.

What to do? Wait. Don’t go around compulsively replacing audio because it can only be done once and you risk losing content permanently. Meta doesn’t have the technical means to clean up in line with the counter-offensive it has put in place and is acting in a disorganized way.

Rather, take advantage of this stalemate to tell your story, to make yourself known even outside of your music. This is the way to promote yourself durably on social media: and when the music will return, the audience will love it, and love you even more.

Tiziana Tentoni