SUISA’s Rules of Procedure were last revised in 2021. In addition to re-editing and corrections, the Rules of Procedure also required substantive amendments; on the one hand, to reflect the new directive of 31 May 2024 on the supervision of collective management organisations, and on the other, for better governance at SUISA. At the same time, the Rules of Procedure were restructured.
Revision of Distribution Rules – Allocation of revenues from background music
Tariff revenues from background music uses (Common Tariff 3a) are allocated in accordance with statistically collected data. In autumn 2024, a new study was conducted by Institut gfs-Zürich to ensure that the allocation of revenues foreseen under point 5.5.2 of the Distribution Rules effectively corresponds to current usage behaviour.
Since the results of the study evidenced variances with the allocations under point 5.5.2, on 6 May 2025, at the proposal of the Executive Committee, the Distribution and Works Committee decided to ask the Board to review this provision. Following the recommendation of the Committee for Tariffs and Distribution, which had conducted a preliminary review, the Board unanimously approved the revision. The amendments will come into force two months after they are approved by the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) and the Office of Economic Affairs of the Principality of Liechtenstein.
Collective rights management in the cross-fire
In many cases, SUISA acts as a central licensing and distribution office so that concert organisers do not have to contact the individual rightholders separately for a licence to perform their works; at the same time, this ensures that all authors, lyricists and publishers can be properly remunerated when their works are performed. In other words, SUISA manages rights collectively.
Collective management, as the term indicates, is a system designed to sustainably ensure the proper and efficient exploitation of copyrights in the interest of the collective. By its very nature, such a system has – individual – opponents: there are cases where organisers would prefer to work without SUISA, just as there are cases where rightholders would prefer to work without SUISA. In both constellations, the preference of the one is detrimental to the other.
SUISA recently outlined the advantages of collective management in a blog article – and promptly received a letter from the lawyers of an agency which would prefer to exploit copyrights directly, i.e. without SUISA. The letter demanded that the Executive Committee correct certain points in the article or delete it alltogether.
A copy of the letter was delivered personally to each Board member for information. The Executive Committee subsequently responded to the letter, denying the complaints and proposing a dialogue.
Board self-evaluation
The Board does not only oversee the Executive Committee, once a year it oversees itself. To this end, it conducts a self-evaluation to implement quality assurance for its own account. Before the meeting, the individual Board members express their views anonymously on critical issues. The evaluation was submitted to the Board meeting on 17 June 2025 and was duly and self-critically acknowledged by the Board.
