Dn the final stretch before the adoption of the 2024 budget, a decisive part is at stake: nothing less than the future of music in our country. Do we want there to still be, in just a few years, new developments in French song, jazz or classical music, and varied concert programs throughout France? Do we want a carbon-free sector that makes more room for women? These are the questions that must be resolved in the days to come.
While, for decades, public policy for music, “live” as recorded, has been the poor relation of cultural action, a common and ambitious tool was set up in 2020, under the first five-year term of Emmanuel Macron: the National Music Center (CNM). The question of its financing is at the heart of debates in the sector, because the issues of emergence, diversity of musical aesthetics, gender equality, ecological transition, in particular, involve new means. Without them, in just a few years, the mainstream, whether North American or Korean, will have crushed everything, in the charts as well as in the programming of theaters and festivals.
Alongside the tax on ticketing for current music shows which has existed for more than twenty years, a State subsidy and a contribution from collective management organizations (Sacem and others), it is imperative to complete this round table for recorded music companies (labels, free and paid streaming platforms) to contribute. Because, thanks to streaming, the record crisis of the 2000s is over, and that’s a good thing.
During the last Music Festival, the President of the Republic posed a simple alternative: either an agreement by these companies, before September 30, to pay a voluntary contribution to the CNM, or a tax on streaming platforms , with a very low rate and a broad base, on free (TikTok, YouTube, etc.) and paid (Spotify, Apple Music and others). The Senate, unanimously among the political groups, assumed its responsibilities by introducing such a system into the 2024 finance bill.
Soft power and cultural sovereignty
Yet it seems that the idea of “voluntary contribution” remains in the running. She’s not up to it. Let’s overlook the fact that the deadline set by Emmanuel Macron has been largely exceeded, proof that companies in the sector are being asked; proof also that within the State some are hesitant. Above all, in substance, the debates that have taken place since the summer show that it is not acceptable to have a public policy for music financed by such a fragile and harmful mechanism.
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