News Update February 2021: Survey, Software, Business Plan
Music usage survey
At the end of last year, we conducted a survey among our members to give us a basis for making decisions about prioritizing which tariffs to introduce first. About half of our music-producing members participated. What came out was that live domestic performances, online downloading, online streaming, and self-released recordings were most important to participants (the latter category of which tends not to be economically relevant to a collecting society). Podcast, web radio, radio, and physical media releases by third parties turned out to be of moderate importance to our members.
Survey on music usage of C3S members (The values on the x-axis mean 1 = ‘is not important to me at all’ to 5 = ‘is very important to me’)
Under the impression that an end of the Corona restrictions is foreseeable, we have decided to go ahead with our original plan to start with a live tariff. We hope that this decision will meet the interest of the majority of our members.
Software and member involvement in our work
Completing our software continues to be an important goal — without it, it is difficult to imagine beginning operations as a collecting society. This winter we started work on the last missing part of the system: the billing module. In addition some members have responded to our call in the last membership newsletter, who want to help actively e.g. in testing the software. Video conferences took place where we presented an introduction to the software. At the moment, we are still looking for a structure to allow for a sustainable open cooperation. However, it remains a challenge to establish a sufficient degree of commitment and continuity without direct interpersonal contact. Whoever has good ideas or concepts for this: please contact us.
The Business Plan — The Final Countdown
Since late last year, our ten-member business plan working group has been in weekly conference calls to address the final missing requirement for approval. We have been working on this since our inception, putting many ideas into it and discarding them often. Various Core activists have provided input to the business plan in the past — mostly as lone editors. And various reviewers have contributed their criticism. Thus, by last year, a rough version had grown, documenting a longer process. This phase was necessary and fruitful. Now the time has come to sort through everything again and to rewrite the business plan in a collective effort: We are determined to have the work on the business plan completed by the next General Assembly. This is not an easy task, because we have to anticipate in detail how a collecting society should function. That is why we are also involving external expertise, both in terms of accompanying and monitoring the actual creation process, as well as for organizational issues and general business management aspects.
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