Statement of the General Management on 2022
In 2022, when an end of the COVID-19 pandemic was finally in sight, there was hope among many people that it would become a year of recovery and getting back to “pre-COVID-conditions”. No chance, however, to utter that sigh of relief: The outbreak of war in Ukraine and its consequences renewed the feeling of uncertainty in society.
The challenges of the 2020ies, still in their early stage, have changed many aspects of our lives forever, be it our consumer behaviour, our media consumption or our employment environment. A “new normal” has taken hold and also left its mark in the creative sector. Developments of the past years have brought about a special dynamic where creative minds followed innovate paths to share their art and their talent. While live business was heavily impacted by the temporary closures of stages, streaming continued to soar, accompanied by IPOs and spectacular catalogue sales of internationally successful performers.
Furthermore, we navigated GVL through these changing times with economic success and achieved historic maximum levels for our payouts. At the same time, we used this special phase to significantly develop from a technical and organisational perspective.
With collections of €235m, we are looking at solid results for 2022. The decrease of our proceeds compared to 2021 is mainly due to one-off special items of the previous year. Despite a significant growth of the licence income from public performance, the so-called “Kneipenrecht” (pub right), we have not yet reached pre-COVID-19-levels.
In order to grow our income once more, we held negotiations in the public performance and broadcast sectors and continue them in the current year. What’s new is the exploitation mandate for online rights: Following the amendment of German copyright law in the summer of 2021, we began talks with platform operators last year in order to implement the new remuneration rights by GVL.
An absolute priority for us is the complete and qualitatively clean processing of product, usage and contribution data – a highly demanding task. Excellent data is the elementary requirement for punctual and smooth distributions. In this context, we rely on the ongoing data input of our partner, i.e. producers, broadcasters and performers and have made huge progress together.
Many other investments and projects have borne fruit: In the meantime, the process for new rights holders to enter into the rights administration agreement is completely paperless and done online. As such, GVL has taken an important step towards a complete digitisation and lowering administrative obstacles.
The producer portal now offers a number of user-friendly functions which facilitate the cooperation between the labels and GVL. At international development level, GVL has taken on an pioneering role in linking itself to the producer database RDx, this in order to push forward the development of uniform global data standards.
An important milestone was reached when running our 2022 performer distribution: We have now entered a regular distribution cycle. This means from 2023: one final distribution per year, and with that, reliability for our rights holders.
Apart from the question “How much money do I get and when?”, our rights holders repeatedly ask us: “How do you do this?”. This is why we continue to focus on bringing the work and the context of GVL closer to our performers and producers. This means giving more insights behind the scenes at GVL and showing the faces of the people who actually provide the services of GVL with their work. We attend workshops and festivals and offer our rights holders varied talk and seminar formats.
We are glad that how GVL is perceived by its rights holders continues to improve with its increasing transparency and that we get positive feedback for our work. In the meantime, encouragement and support are our companions on the path of fundamental transformation that we chose as a modern service company. This is something that encourages and motivates us to continue doing our best for our performers and labels.
Providing continued and sustainable support to the creative sector and nurturing its diversity is part of GVL’s self-image. As a consequence, we promote a broad range of projects, awards and conventions. At the same time, we collaborate closely with the central institutions of the industry, among them the Initiative Musik which is celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2023. Since its inception, we, as the principal shareholder, have been backing the largest German institution supporting popular music, and that not just in the financial sense.
Particularly in times of change a diverse cultural landscape offers so much more than just a bit of background music. Instead, it can actually set the tone for a change in society: Art and culture provide unique platforms to convey ideas, sharpen awareness for important topics and make different perspectives visible.
At GVL, we view ourselves as a part of this diverse cultural landscape. We celebrate this plurality and are committed with great passion to our mission statement: We support the act.”
Yours
Guido Evers & Tilo Gerlach