GEMA, SACEM, and How European Collecting Societies Set Their Own Rates

Two Systems, One Directive

When a German commercial radio station plays a song, it pays GEMA — the Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte, Germany's collecting society for composers, lyricists and publishers. The rate it pays is set by GEMA's own published tariff schedule, negotiated with broadcaster associations and, where agreement fails, adjudicated by an arbitration board under the Verwertungsgesellschaftengesetz, Germany's collecting-society statute. A French station playing the same song pays SACEM — the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique — under a structurally different schedule tied to a percentage of the station's gross revenue, with rates that vary by the station's audience reach and the proportion of music in its output.

The two societies share a legal parent: the EU Collective Rights Management Directive of 2014, which bound all member-state collecting societies to common standards of transparency, governance and member reporting. What the directive did not standardise was the tariffs themselves. Those remain a matter of national law and bilateral negotiation — which means the effective cost of broadcasting a European catalogue differs significantly depending on which side of the Rhine the transmitter sits.

GEMA's radio tariff for commercial broadcasters is calculated primarily on a per-hour basis weighted by the station's annual revenue, adjusted for music density — the share of airtime actually occupied by licensed repertoire. SACEM's equivalent is a direct percentage of turnover, typically in the range of several percent depending on category, with separate schedules for public broadcasters, commercial networks and online-only services. Neither society publishes a single headline rate that covers all circumstances; both maintain detailed tariff tables that are updated periodically and available in their respective national languages on each society's public website.

Cross-border licensing — a European webcaster streaming into both France and Germany — still requires separate agreements with each society, or recourse to the reciprocal representation agreements that GEMA and SACEM hold with one another as members of CISAC, the global network of authors' societies. The 2014 directive created a mechanism for multi-territory licensing of online music rights, but uptake among radio-format services has been limited; most broadcasters continue to license territory by territory. Divergence, not harmonisation, remains the operational reality.