Music Collecting Societies and Webcasting

Most academic work on copyright collecting societies has focused on the relation between the society and the collecting societies or on the external efficiency of collecting societies. In this paper we are more concerned about the internal efficiency of collecting societies in the field of music. We explore the issue in the context of webcasting licensing arrangements and discuss the effects of the collecting societies to the competition between individual musicians. The authors of this paper believe that a typical agreement between collectives and right holders favour certain groups of artist with the expense of others. There is an inherited conflict of interest on what kind of pricing model collecting societies should choose between the established artists and artists in their early careers. The same can be also applied to the artists who perform mainstream music versus the artist who are more in the niche genres of music. Finally, we propose a more refined model for webcasting licensing arrangements with price discrimination