Emerging cultural practices

I think the main impact of the digital shift has been an empowerment of consumers and citizens in accessing culture so in bypassing intermediaries, in actually selecting themselves what they wanted to hear what, they want to listen to, what they wanted to read. And I think this has led to a different relationship between consumers and production companies, which also were relying directly with intermediaries like distributors. So production companies and artists have to establish a historic relationship with consumers and citizens, either through live performances when you are an artist or through managing data that you receive on consumers’ preferences.

So this direct relationship and the power given to consumers to actually select cultural goods and the cultural offers is major changes in the way the industry has been operating of the last 20 years. The other change is obviously the actors, the infrastructure, the networks have replaced other networks and other ways of selling cultural goods. And they have not affected so much the distribution of values between the different operators in the value chain. But those actors are very powerful, they’re big, they are global, they are very international. So they are the “GAFA”, the Google, the Amazon, the Netflix, the Facebook.

And so this puts the importance of the industry to organise, especially the independent sector to organise collectively with a view to be able to negotiate fair terms, address value gaps in terms of payment, of royalties for their contribution to the expansion of those networks which very much base their development of their communities, their access to citizens because of their offering of music and video. And one of the issue is obviously to make sure that artists that contribute to the expansion those networks actually get paid for their contribution.