This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Education & Events Labels & Publishers Legal
Vivendi boss: Governments should do more on piracy
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 24 January 2011
The boss of Vivendi, the French parent company of Universal Music, told MIDEM this weekend that governments around the world needed to step up their efforts to combat piracy.
Being interviewed by FT journalist Ben Fenton at the Cannes music business conference, Jean-Bernard Levy said: “I’m amazed by the continued unavailability of strong legal solutions that could be enforced in most countries in the world”. He noted that there had been some progress in some territories, recognising that the Hadopi laws in his own country had albeit as yet unproven potential, and that in Sweden new anti-piracy rules combined with the boom of Spotify had led to a fall in file-sharing levels.
But, he said, more should be done. He told the conference: “The problem we have is music is popular, music is global, and it’s up to us to get consumers, with the support of government, to pay for it”.
But other than sitting around waiting for governments to crack the anti-piracy whip, what else should music companies be doing? Think global says Levy, and try to engage the 80% of the world’s population that have never been “a significant part of the music industry”. Mobile could play a key role here, he said, pointing to Universal Music’s partnerships with mobile operators in India, Brazil and the Middle East. He said: “We are now deriving revenues which are not a substitution from record sales, but a new stream of revenue”.
Levy was speaking as reports began to emerge of significant layoffs within the Universal Music Group, especially in the US. These, presumably, are part of new CEO Lucian Grainge’s promised overhaul of the music major’s operations.
