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Making available music and videos on the internet

Apply for a licence

Apply here for a licence to make videos with music available on the internet.

Online form

For videos with music published on the internet, a distinction must be made between two categories of rights: the right to produce the video and the right to make the video available.

When music is used on videos in the internet (e.g. for image videos), the authors are entitled to the following remuneration:

  • For the production of the video: 
    The rights for the use of music in online videos have to be verified for each video individually. You may already have acquired the necessary rights (e.g. in the case of commissioned music) or you may not have produced the video yourself but obtained it from your foreign business partner, for example. However, if the videos were produced in Switzerland without the production rights having been licensed, they must be registered with SUISA. For further information on this subject, see “company films” and tariff information: Tariff VN.
  • For the making-available of the video:
    This fee is calculated based on the production budget (higher or lower than the CHF 30,000 threshold) and the number of videos with music which you make available on your own websites and social media pages.  The licence fee can be settled either as a monthly or an annual flat fee. To enable us to calculate the fee, we need you to report the number of videos made available across all your websites, the relevant production budget, and the date you counted your videos (counting reference date). The licence fees are indicated in the Licence Terms and Conditions

How to proceed:

Please send us the duly completed questionnaire. We will then issue the licence and invoice. Once your payment is received, we distribute the remuneration to the beneficiary composers, lyricists, and publishers.

Please take into consideration any other relevant rights

Documents

FAQ: Frequently asked questions

Reporting: Making available of music on websites

  • 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. 

Basic questions: Making available of music on websites

  • 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.

Music rights: Making available of music on websites

  • 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.