Spain’s largest rights collecting society is changing the way that it distributes royalties from music broadcast on television.
The swindle involved members who were also broadcasters playing songs they owned rights to on late-night Spanish television — sometimes as low-level background music – and collecting the royalties.
Paris-based CISAC readmitted SGAE last March, citing a number of reforms it had made, including establishing a code of conduct to address conflicts of interest. That same month, Spain’s national court separately acquitted a group of defendants led by the former president of SGAE,, who had been briefly detained by police in 2011 and then stood accused of embezzling millions of euros from the collecting society.
For SGAE’s members, the reforms bring some rare good news, following years of courtroom battles and feuding between executives, notably over allegations of fraud, document forgery and mismanagement.into the troubled society looking into “a possible abuse of a dominant position.
It’s not the first run in that SGAE has had with the regulator. In 2019, CNMC fined he organization almost 3 million euros for unfairly limiting the ability of members to withdraw their rights, as well as for using a system of bundled rights that prevented outsiders from making pricing comparisons between different competitors.