Artist
By opening an Artist account on the Music Park association's website (non-profit-making french law 1901) you become a member of the association and therefore not only adhere to the objectives of the association, but you also enter an organization that gives you the possibility to broadcast your musical works on the internet but also to be broadcast in the network of the association's broadcaster members, more concretely to be broadcast in public places for which the broadcaster members have required Music Park membership so that they can acquire the authorization to broadcast the works of Music Park's member artists.
In order for works to be broadcast without the broadcaster members having to pay royalties on copyright (the rights of authors and/or composers) and related rights (the rights of performers), you must not have deposited your works in the repertoire of a copyright management society (such as SACEM, for example), in other words you must not have joined such a body, whether in France or abroad (SABAM Belgium, GEMA Germany, SGAE Spain, SIAE Italy, etc.). ), nor have you published your works "for commercial purposes". In fact, first of all, with regard to copyright, if you have joined a (private) copyright management company, you assign, whether you like it or not, the management of the major part of your economic copyright (economic, i.e. those that may allow you to claim, in certain circumstances, income) of all your works. As a result, you can no longer authorize the broadcasting of your works as you wish, you can no longer say to someone (a friend for example): "You can broadcast my music in your shop (a public place in this case) or for your party with your association without having to pay the royalties"; you are no longer the manager of your economic rights and you cannot force the company that manages your rights to do as you wish (1). Then concerning neighbouring rights, so that the works broadcast are not subject to Article L214-1 of the Intellectual Property Code and so that broadcasters do not have to pay royalties on neighbouring rights (performers' rights) and so that consequently the performer can authorise the broadcasting of the works he interprets without the broadcaster having to pay neighbouring rights, the works you offer on the music-park.org website must not have been commercialised. In other words, you must not have put on sale the recordings of your music that you offer, whether in the form of a file or CD on an internet platform or in a shop or at your concerts, for example.
However, do not confuse the fact that we are ta
Ouvrir un compte Artiste sur le site de l'association Music Park vous donne la possibilité, entre autre, de publier vos œuvres musicales, d’éditer une page profil public et pro, d’être diffuser sur le réseau des membres Diffuseurs, et vous pourrez aussi bénéficier d'une assistance pour créer votre propre site.
ds to the royalties, in agreement of course with the musicians with whom you play. Let's imagine you author and performer and 3 musicians who accompany you, a sales contract of 1000 €uros, of which 4 x 200 (200 euros gross for each performer), 100 euros for the royalties that will be paid directly to you (2), and 100 euros to pay for the various expenses (fuel, food, etc). This is just an example and the choices can be different, personally (this is the president of the association speaking to you here but as a musician) I think that including a share for copyright in the contract should only be retained if you are playing the works of someone who does not earn any income from this event as a performer. To do so, the author and/or composer must obviously not be a member of a copyright administration society himself, otherwise the organizer will obviously be obliged to pay a royalty.
In any case, you can see that this way of looking at the management of your copyright offers you greater flexibility, greater freedom and gives you advantages that are not negligible. In this regard, to better understand all the mechanisms that govern the dissemination of music and copyright, you can consult the various articles on the site concerning questions of copyright, neighbouring rights, autonomy, independence and emancipation, among others, and do not hesitate to ask questions.
To go further in the emancipation of musicians, Music Park also proposes, and this is new in the services offered by Music Park, to help you create your own website. Of course, you can edit a site yourself without any help with solutions such as wix and many other website editors of the same type, that is to say commercial, or would we say proprietary. But while these editors allow you to edit a site very easily, they have some significant drawbacks that must be taken into account if you want to have a serious and less expensive solution. Indeed, if you opt for a free solution on these editors you will have advertising, which compromises the seriousness of your site and yourself as an artist, if you opt for the paid version the rates are not very interesting and especially you risk having to pay for other services if you decide to have additional functions than those proposed by default. On the other hand, you risk being limited in the development of your site on this type of editor, both in terms of functionality and design. We won't go into the full details of the drawbacks of such editors here, but it is a choice that you might regret in the long run.
On the other hand, there are several free and open source editors like WordPress or Joomla and you can train relatively easily to create a site, nevertheless Music Park advises you to use Drupal because it is the CMS (Content Management System) which has the greatest granularity and has a multilingual management, among other things, very efficient (especially since version 8). To quickly explain, all CMS have a core, a set of modules (extensions), by default and the possibility to add multiple functionalities thanks to other modules. The modules have, depending on the CMS, more or less great possibilities of settings, which gives some CMS more or less functions, and among the open source and free CMS Drupal is by far the best. If we had to quickly compare for example WordPress and Drupal, to make a metaphor, we would say that WordPress is Playmobil and Drupal of Legos.
Anyway, failing to tell you everything here and drown you with technical explanations that would seem absurd, Music Park offers to help you in the creation of a Drupal site. This will include you to do some technical learning that remains within everyone's reach, but after that you will have a much wider field of possibilities than with solutions like wix or other and especially you will have passed one of the steps that will bring you a better autonomy and independence.
Indeed it is in the spirit of the objectives of Music Park, namely the emancipation of artists (in music), that this new service is proposed for artists who join the Music Park association. And by the way, Music Park also offers a free directory service of artists' websites https://localisemusic.com. This service is undoubtedly the best proposal for the emancipation of artists from intermediaries, here particularly streaming sites that try to capture all artists such as Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Qobuz, Amazon Music Unlimited, etc.. The goal of a service like localisemusic.com is to allow a direct relationship between the audience and the artist. Localisemusic Music is a bit like arriving at a crossroads from where all the roads lead to the artists' houses, knowing that on localisemusic.com you can search with the style of music or other types of filters. Try to search with a musical style in the Google search engine, it won't give you much, whereas there you will have all the (referenced) sites of the artists who play music in this style. Of course afterwards you have to have the artist's site where you can listen to the works, or even download them. So you don't need Spotify, Deezer, etc. anymore. No more letting intermediaries get rich on your back. Note that localisemusic.com is open to all artists.
(1): Concerning the copyright royalty that a shop owner would have to pay when he or she broadcasts your works, you can be sure that if you are a member of a rights management society (SACEM for example) and you generate very little copyright income, your chances of getting a share of the royalties are nil. Why is this? Quite simply because the shop owner will pay a flat fee without providing the SACEM with a list of the music he has broadcast, and even if he wants to do so, the SACEM will not take this into account. Thus SACEM, not knowing that it is your music that has been broadcast, will not pay you for the rights that you are entitled to. The revenues collected by SACEM will go to the authors who have a wide distribution, who are quoted on multiple mailing lists on the so-called historical TV and radio channels.
(2): This way of dealing with copyright also allows you to be sure of collecting royalties if you wish to collect royalties on such and such an event and to avoid SACEM's pre-emption for management fees, which is of the order of 15 to 20%.