The pandemic is a thing of the past, the Covid-19 restrictions are behind us. Yet … The impact on culture continues to be felt. As such, it is often still inexplicable why one event is sold out while another has to be cancelled due to insufficient advance ticket sales. What is certain is that “normality” will take longer than expected. And what does normal mean?
It seems undeniable that the effects of the pandemic are still being felt in the cultural sector. In recent years, it has certainly been very positive to note how united and quickly various institutions have decided and paid support services. SUISA was thus able to use the COVID-19 emergency fund ratified by the 2020 General Meeting to support some members who had found themselves in economic distress due to the pandemic. We will continue to provide this assistance until the end of June 2023.
“A crisis is a productive state, you just have to take away the taste of disaster.” I used this quote from Swiss author Max Frisch in an article almost a year ago as a guideline for SUISA’s objectives in the pandemic. So where did we get to?
SUISA increased sales in the markets spared by the pandemic (online) and continued to drive various (technological) developments. The Covid-19 pandemic has clearly demonstrated how important efficient services are so that distribution results can be optimised as best as possible even in the event of a drop in collections.
This year, for example, we will strive for further improvements, particularly, in surveying the market by using new monitoring systems. A few years ago we were able to improve the distribution data with the hitboxes in the clubs, now we will also work with an “event crawler”. A specialised computer program is used to search for music events, identify them and register them in a database, which is then matched with events that have already been registered. This will enable us to record music usage even more completely and increase sales, especially for concerts and entertainment events.
2023 – a year in which everything will hopefully return to “normal”, but something special will also take place: SUISA turns 100! More to follow on this soon …
We are looking forward to the next century!
