It’s important to note at this point that music is not a subsidiary, luxury, minor industry for the UK. We are the second biggest provider of music to the world after the USA. Music is of enormous benefit to us as a country. That is a fact, not an opinion. Nor is it special pleading. For a modern, developed country to deliberately, wilfully strangle one of its lead exporters is bordering on insane. Indeed, the Creative Industries as a whole are the fastest-growing sector in our economy, worth last year just under £100bn to our national coffers (to put that in context, in 2016 the NHS cost us £115bn). The Creative Industries Federation are deeply concerned about the knock-on effects of Brexit on this sector and have published their concerns accordingly:
https://www.creativeindustriesfederatio ... industries…as have the Musicians’ Union:
https://www.musiciansunion.org.uk/Home/ ... Movement-f….and my own professional composers’ body, BASCA
https://basca.org.uk/2016/06/28/basca-reacts-brexit/A little post-script to the use of my music and my working in the US as compared to my doing so in the EU: the US applies an at-source ‘withholding tax’ to any earnings I make there. Nice for the US economy. I am not then taxed a second time on that income in the UK (as far as I know!). However, if I work in France or Spain or the Czech Republic, 100% of the taxable part of that income goes to the UK exchequer to help our economy. When/If we leave the EU, withholding tax will undoubtedly be raised by EU member states since we will then be outside its harmonised tax regime, as a third party state. The UK exchequer loses out, again.
You’d imagine, perhaps, that being a professional composer might not be as severely affected by the end of Freedom of Movement within Europe as one would as a player, or as a highly-skilled video editor, sound engineer, or App developer. It’s true that the music itself will still be performed, in my case that means all over the world.
Anyone who’s ever been on holiday in Asia will have seen that copyright piracy is more or less endemic in these would-be vast markets for music and other creative forms. You can buy a DVD or a CD of more or less anything off the street, not to mention software programs or video games, and no-one is paying the creators of this work a cent for doing so. This includes, for example, the music that I write for the Mr Bean films, TV programmes and animated movies that have a massive audience all over the world. The laws that protect copyright-holders have during the past 40 years been harmonised across the EU and we as individuals, never mind individual countries, have unquantifiably more clout in negotiating with other territories as a unified group than on our own. It’s baffling why I even need to spell this out in the 21st century, as if there’s anyone left alive who doesn’t get this simple fact of the market place.
As it happens, European copyright laws have during my 40-year career as a professional composer been far more protective towards me and my fellow creators than our own UK government. That applies to the children of creators too. Thanks to our membership of the EU, in 1995, the UK’s old copyright term, life of the writer + 50 years, was increased to life of writer + 70 years.
The first giant wave of copyright piracy (let’s call it what it is – theft) was back in the day of cassette recorders. The music industry’s losses to cassette copying in the 1980s were seismic, even when compared to modern-day internet piracy. Creators’ organisations asked merely that there might be a small levy (15p I seem to remember was the figure proposed in the mid-80s) placed on the sale of every blank cassette to remunerate all the composers and musicians whose work was being ripped off by millions every day. The EU backed this request but the UK Tory government of the time, lobbied by the companies who were profiting from selling the cassettes and players, refused to grant the levy. The EU also responded to creators’ requests for the granting of so-called ‘Moral’ rights to writers, composers and copyright holders, so that, in an era where media were increasingly being transferred on, re-sold, syndicated and otherwise re-distributed, the original makers of a work would have to be acknowledged. Along with acknowledgement of someone’s contribution to a film, or record, or TV programme came a much greater likelihood that they would be remunerated as their work was shunted on down the line from enterprise to enterprise. Moral rights were therefore a good, fair idea and were also forward-thinking to the world of media distribution that is the norm in our new century. Guess what? The EU granted the rights and the Tory government in the UK took them away by satute (in 1988). Which, incidentally, rather refutes the Brexiteer trope that the EU ‘imposes’ its laws on our parliament.
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I write books. I’ve written two on the history of music that – in their modest way – are best-sellers in their field (I know I’m not exactly JK Rowling or Dan Brown, but they have been translated into many languages and are still on sale throughout the world).
Why would Brexit affect these sales? Well, surprise surprise, the ramifications of our leaving the EU are likely to impact badly on British publishers for all sorts of reasons. I am guessing the average book-reader (and referendum voter) has been totally unaware of these issues. There’s a New York Times article about all this which summarises the problems:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/book ... m=referralIt does not make easy reading. The nub of it is that the difference to an author when we are no longer inside the EU is the difference between earning about a £1 royalty from the sale of a hardback, and earning a 10p royalty from the same book. Quite a big difference. Nadine Dorries MP is an author herself. I wonder if she knows that the re-configuring of British books as ‘export’ to the EU rather than ‘home market’, or that the UK will have to fight off competition from the much bigger US publishing houses for the sale of English-language books in Europe, is one of the consequences of the Brexit she espouses?
so yes, agree with what you say.
