Björn Ulvaeus, co-founder of Swedish music group ABBA, discussed copyright buyouts for TV series and streaming services and how royalties allowed him to write “from 9 to 5” with Billboard in a new interview.
The Swedish songwriter, musician, singer, guitarist and producer has sold more than 400 million records worldwide. His advocacy for authors’ rights fuels his role as the president of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), which protects the rights and promotes the interests of the more than 4 million creators around the world it represents. He discussed creators’ rights and the future of songwriting in an interview with Billboard deputy editorial director Robert Levine and CISAC director general Gadi Oron on Friday for the Billboard Pro Spotlight series, “Creators and Copyright,” which examines some of the urgent issues in copyright domestically in the United States and internationally.
Copyright buyouts for streaming services allow companies like Netflix to buy all the rights to a composition, with the songwriters collecting the money upfront and bypassing any royalties on the backend. “It’s of course up to the individual songwriter and the situation that he’s in personally when he allows a buyout or not,” Ulvaeus says, adding that CISAC offers advice for songwriters who are contemplating whether to give their rights away or not. But from Ulvaeus’ personal experience, he wouldn’t recommend it.
“Being a songwriter myself and knowing what copyright has done for me and the sense of pride I have in owning my rights, I would tell any songwriter, ‘Please don’t do it unless you really, really have to,'” he suggested.
Ulvaeus’ compositions extends beyond his work with ABBA: He co-wrote the lyrics for the musicals Mamma Mia!, Chess and Kristina från Duvemåla and co-composed the music for the first two with his fellow ABBA member and songwriting ace Benny Andersson. Ulvaeus and Andersson also worked together on both of the Mamma Mia! films based on ABBA’s pop hits, which the two co-wrote starting in the 1970s. But the competition for songwriters to get paid has only grown “fiercer,” he notes, over the decades.
On April 16, the 76-year-old hitmaker commissioned a study done by MIDiA Research, which has expertise in the music and digital media businesses, called “Rebalancing the Song Economy.” The study argues that songwriters, despite their many revenue streams of performance, sync, mechanicals and streaming royalties, have less diverse income than performing artists because all of their money stems from the song itself. And with the COVID-19 pandemic halting live performances and closing down restaurants, shops and bars that play and sell music, streaming has become the prime source of songwriters’ income but leaves them with pittance. An illustrative model in the “Rebalancing the Song Economy” study that determines streaming growth by measuring actual income growth for the label, the artist, the publisher and the songwriter proves the songwriter does not prevail and, much like the artist, can only measure their growth in hundreds of dollars, compared to the label and publisher’s millions.
“It’s more tempting now because the copyright money was much more for more people, and streaming has, of course, made a huge difference. So I think it’s easier now to do that,” he continued. “You’re so unsecure and you don’t know if someone is paying you money straight away or something, you don’t know what’s going to happen to it. The competition out there is fierce, and it’s much fiercer than it was during the ’70s when Benny Andersson and I could afford to write from 9 to 5 because of royalties.”
Watch the full interview above, and find more on Billboard Pro’s Spotlight on Creators and Copyright.
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