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GVL Administration

You can make money with music in various ways. Selling your music through platforms like Beatport, Apple Music or Spotify is probably the most common way. You can also monetize your music based on the fingerprinting systems on YouTube and Facebook. As mentioned in our last post, it's definitely a good strategy to use these major platforms for your label. However, as a label, there is another way to make money with your music that probably not everyone may be aware of: You can register your music to collecting societies such as the German GVL and every time your track is used by radio stations or on TV, you will receive royalty from it. You've never heard of the GVL? Don't worry - we will now explain everything you need to know about it.

 

What is GVL?
The GVL (german: Gesellschaft zur Verwertung von Leistungsschutzrechten) has direct contracts with many radio stations and TV stations in Germany in order to collect royalties for music that is broadcasted. If you're a producer, a label or a performing artist, and your music is played on radio or TV, the GVL will collect royalties for the usage of your music based on each broadcasted minute. 

 

What’s the difference between GEMA and GVL? 
Well, the main difference between these two collecting societies is that GEMA only covers the rights for authors, composers, publishers and writers of a sound recording whereas GVL represents the interests of performing artists, producers and labels.   

 

What does the GVL do?
The GVL mediates between rights holders and rights exploiters. Without the GVL as a collecting society, radio and TV stations that want to use music or audiovisual productions, would have to agree individually with the labels and artists whether they are allowed to use these titles. Conversely, in the case of a large number of uses, each label would have to take care of the remuneration itself and on an ongoing basis. The GVL takes over the entire mediation between the rights holders and rights administrators. It licenses the world music repertoire to the rights exploiters and in return receives revenues which it distributes to the rights holders.
Radio and TV stations are committed to report the usage of music content directly to the collecting societies such as the German GVL. 

 

What dig dis! can help you with
The whole GVL registration process can be challenging and very much time consuming, as there’s a lot of bureaucracy to handle first. Additionally every new recording needs to be manually registered at GVL. But that’s why you have dig dis! as your reliable music distributor. We have been registering our labels and their content with the GVL for years and are collecting the resulting revenue for them. Note: Due to international agreements with other collecting societies GVL is able to collect royalties not only for the German territory but also for many other countries in the world. 

Many music distributors forget this type of income because of the high effort that needs to be put in, but we have spared no strain and we strive to get the best out of our label's music. The revenue is paid out yearly and you will find it in your statements. You only have to register with us and let us know that you want to use our GVL registration service - we’ll then take care of everything else for you and the best part is: It’s 100% free of charge.