Building the fair music standards
At presentations and discussions of the fair music initiative people often ask what the criteria of a fair music label are and how a music producer or distributor can get this label. Peter Rantasa, director of mica - music austria and initiator of fair music: “I myself do not decide what is fair in music business and what not. The standards for fairness and justice in the music business have to be developed in a consensus building stakeholder process - and this takes time.”
These standards that products and distribution channels will have to meet in order to receive a fair music seal of approval, will be developed by the fair music initiative together with the International Music Council (IMC - an international NGO in formal associate relations with UNESCO) and music and cultural NGOs.
Peter Rantasa: “fair music adopts the idea and the empirical knowlege of the Fair Trade Organisations and takes it to the world of cultural goods and services. The Frair Trade Organisations did not decide in a top-down-way what is fair and what not, and so will we.” Rantasa as well stresses upon the fact that the standards for fair music have to be developed for each product individually - be it i.e. CDs, downloads or net-labels.
Until the standards have been developed corporations can sign a code of conduct with which they show that they will abide by fair rules and regulations in the music world: protection of artistic freedom, well-balanced contracts for musicians, fair remuneration for composers and musicians, as well as a fair distribution of opportunities for smaller producers worldwide and especially for musicians of the Global South.
To make it easily understandable what it means for the music business to be fair the fair music award will be given for achievements for fairness in the music business to companies and initiatives annually as from September 2007.
Photo by eqqman from Flickr under a Creative Commons license Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic
