Meta and Siae meet, but an agreement on music is still far away

“Meta’s license for Siae content expired on December 16th and right now, as we speak, there is still unlicensed content on the platform. And until the day the negotiations broke down, ten days ago, they continued to operate without a licence”. Said the president of SIAE, Salvo Nastasi, during the hearing before the culture commissions of the Chamber and Senate on the lack of agreement between Meta and Siae. “When that license expired – observed Nastasi – we sat down to renew it, but we didn’t have the data we requested to be able to renew that agreement”. Data that “on the basis of the European legislation, the platforms must provide the counterparty, in this case the SIAE”.

“The protection of copyright is our priority, we have agreements with all the main rights holders in Italy and abroad”, replies Angelo Mazzetti, Head of Institutional Affairs of Meta. The company just yesterday announced an agreement with RTI for copyright protection. “All these agreements were renewed after the entry into force of the Copyright Directive. If we have removed the Siae catalog it is precisely out of respect for intellectual property”. And on the abruptly interrupted negotiation, Mazzetti offers a different version: “We have not decided to interrupt the negotiations unilaterally. The license expired on December 15, 2022, and we have already been in contact since last August to renew the agreement. The negotiations were interrupted due to the nature of the amount requested by Siae, which was initially 4 times higher than the agreed amount until 2022 without any reason being given while the license fees were substantially the same. We did what we could to keep the negotiation going, presented a significantly higher offer. We have progressively increased our offer trying to meet the requests of Siae which, however, refused to accept any offer lower than an increase of +310%. We are not willing to close deals that are unreasonable from an economic and market point of view”.

Meta’s claim is based on the business model of social networks, for which music is not a main voice: actually you don’t go to Facebook and Instagram to listen to music, if anything, there are YouTube and Spotify for that. “Our revenues derive from advertising on a plurality of content that does not contain music,” recalls Mazzetti. “We don’t even have monetization tools for short formats (like Reels). We have them for long videos (above 60 seconds) and on those we have proposed revenue sharing to Siae”.

Instagram and Facebook begin to delete Siae’s music from social networks

by Bruno Ruffilli

March 17, 2023

The positions of the two parties therefore still seem very distant: “In the negotiation with Meta we are resisting and will resist, but we cannot resist indefinitely. The government is giving us a hand, even if it is a negotiation between private individuals, Minister Sangiuliano intervened as did several parliamentarians, and we are pleased about this. A parliamentary resolution could help us to give more impetus to the government to intervene and politically push a giant like Meta to give us the data and sit around a negotiating table”, observed Nastasi. “When they cornered us, the negotiations didn’t stop. If Meta tells us to sit at the table again, we sit down. And we hope, despite the threats, that the negotiation will proceed”. Meanwhile, on Facebook and Instagram, reels, photos, videos remain without music.