FAQ - Musik im Internet bei grossen Unternehmen

Musicians have a legal claim to royalties when their music is made publicly available in videos on the internet. SUISA invoices the fees and passes them on to the authors. 

Yes. SUISA is responsible for collecting the fees for all videos intended for the public in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. As a rule, these rights cannot be settled abroad. If your foreign partner only uses music that is not subject to royalties, it is possible that the rights for making available in Switzerland have been settled.

You will no longer have to pay us, respectively the rightholders (authors and publishers), any fees in the following year.

The fee depends on the number of videos with music made available and on the production budget.

Yes. It covers all the videos made available on your company’s own websites and social media profiles. Once the production budget for the videos on your internet pages exceeds CHF 30,000, these licence conditions no longer apply. In this case, kindly inform us by email to gkvideo@suisa.ch.

For each web presence, i.e. on your Youtube and Facebook Channel, as well as on your own website, you are making 100 videos available. That makes a total of 300. And that is the number you must report.

For each web presence, i.e. on your Youtube and Facebook Channel, as well as on your own website, you are making 100 videos available. That makes a total of 300. And that is the number you must report.

No. If you only make your videos available on intranet, we assume that you are paying the relevant fees for usage under Common Tariff 9 and through PRO LITTERIS. 

If you only have your total number of videos, regardless whether or not they contain music, you can simply report the total number. Experience shows that 75% of all videos contain music. Accordingly, we will deduct 25% from the total number reported. idéos contiennent de la musique. Dans ces conditions, nous allons réduire le nombre total de vos vidéos de 25 %. 

Yes, you can choose whichever reference date you wish. Based on your report, you will be invoiced for the current year. The invoice for the following year will be sent in April.If, in the following year, the number of videos changes and moves into a different fee bracket, you should let us know by 28 February. Adjustments may be made once a year. Please report the changes on the following form Link: Application for making music available in the internet

On social media it is relatively easy to find the total number of videos. On Youtube, for example, you can see the total number of videos at a glance when you access your channel. On Facebook you find the number under the heading “videos”, they should be counted there. On Instagram you have to scroll through all the posts and count them individually. 

If the author is not a member of any collecting society like SUISA (or Germany’s GEMA for example), you do not have to pay anything. Otherwise, you will have to pay a fee for the making-available. With such authors you can settle the synchronisation rights, and in certain cases also the production and reproduction rights, directly.

No. Under the licence you only pay the author’s making-available fee for the music you use on the Internet. You first have to obtain the synchronisation and production rights for each video. If you copy the music from an existing source (e.g. a sound recording or directly from the Internet), then you must also obtain the rights in the recording (known as neighboring rights).

You can obtain the production rights from SUISA. For the synchronisation rights, you must contact each rightholder (composer, lyricist, publisher) individually. For the neighbouring rights, you should contact either the producer of the sound recording (the “label”), or IFPI, or Audion. We recommend that you use our production music catalogue. Music from the list of providers includes all the rights and saves the effort of acquiring them.

Yes. The rightholders may also assert their claims retrospectively or instruct us to do so on their behalf.

The licence is valid worldwide if you use production music (also known as library or mood music), or music from rightholders who have concluded a contract with us (as a rule all authors in Switzerland). We cannot grant global licences for the international music repertoire.  However, if there is a conflict with a foreign sister society, for example, we will in any event act as intermediary and coordinate the proper licensing solution.

Your fees, net of a 15% commission, are passed on to the entitled parties. 

Yes, if your number of videos with music changes only slightly, or not at all, and the new number of videos is still in the same fee bracket.
If the number of videos (for the following year) moves into a different fee bracket, you should let us know via our customer portal by 28 February.