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Swedish musicians set for YouTube windfall

Sweden's biggest music copyright management organization has struck a landmark deal with YouTube that will allow Swedish artists to get a cut when their music is played on the video-streaming mammoth.

Swedish musicians set for YouTube windfall

Sweden’s 90-year-old society for songwriters, composers, and music producers, the Swedish Performing Rights Society (Svenska Tonsättares Internationella Musikbyrå – Stim) has made a deal with YouTube to allow its 75,000 members access to money through YouTube.

“We’re excited that we’ve struck a deal with the largest entertainment platform of today, and it’s almost to the month on our 90th birthday,” Stim spokeswoman Karin Jihde told The Local.

“It’s taken a long time to come to an agreement on terms and conditions, but now both parties are happy, and it’s been very important for us to represent our members and to make a deal that was fair and based on what the market is doing.”

While Jihde said she could not put an exact figure on how much the song creators will earn, she explained that members will earn money based on a video’s popularity.

“It depends on how much their music is played and how much YouTube makes in connection with their content. It’s hard to tell how much each individual will make exactly, it’s all dependent on the consumer use,” Jihde said.

Stim concentrates on the “creators” of music, meaning their members are the people behind the music such as the songwriters, publishers, and composers, and Jihde was quick to praise Sweden’s rich history in the industry.

See also: Paul Connolly on why Swedish pop is the best in the world

“I think it’s fantastic how Sweden has songwriters on the top of the billboard charts across the world week after week. And it’s not just the hits, we have some great composers who are succeeding too, our members really are across all the genres,” she said.

And Stim, which has a free membership for music creators, looked set to carry on in the same direction.

“We see it as a milestone that we got this deal right when we turned 90. Our mission to songwriters hasn’t changed at all,” she told The Local.

“Our task is to ensure composers are getting paid when their music is played. Collecting that money has become a whole different ball game as everything becomes digital, but we’re really excited to be part of the challenge.”

Oliver Gee

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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