I will do my best.
The bottom line is that screen composers are not able to determine their own rates. We rely on copyright policy to do that for us. There's probably no other business in the world where somebody can bring their product to the marketplace and have an agency set their rate.
The responsibility of government policy to set a responsible rate thwarts the bias that we often hear. The way the rate has to be set is that it has to look into the community, the society, the way screen composers go to work every day.
I remember hearing a staggering figure about Daniel Ek, the creator of Spotify. When Spotify first became an entity that was streaming music around the world, his salary was published. As the owner and creator of that service he was reported to be making around $24 million to $25 million per year. In the same year, I remember looking at what Gordon Nixon was making as the CEO and director of the Royal Bank of Canada, which was about $12 million. I looked at the list of all the other people at Spotify, and the directors were all in the double-digit millions. Artists were making nothing, and you know that story.
Dan Hill once said to me that when two songwriters embark on writing a song together, there's no discussion about who owns what word, who wrote that melody, who wrote that motif or that theme. No, we drop those things at the door, and it's a fifty-fifty deal. If three songwriters collaborate, it's understood it's a three-way deal, because you can't track those small differences.
Screen composers and songwriters are faced with a really badly biased situation, whereby all the media companies that are delivering the data over their pipes are making a lot of money compared to us. We're seeing that kind of remuneration to the directors of the services that are subscribing them, Netflix, etc. We want a fairer deal.
Copyright is the shepherd of our creative industry. It's like Mother Nature. If you read the paper we authored, our vision is that a techno-moral and virtuous copyright policy will observe when there's imbalance in the system that is leading to the extinction of some of the players somewhere in that ecosystem. Like Mother Nature, it has to intervene and protect. If it doesn't, and if the screen composers, for example, start to not be able to make their own living, that means the orchestrators, the arrangers, the lyricists, the music editors, the recording studios, all our suppliers are going to feel that. We have to right this problem. The 20th century model no longer works. I've explained why, and so does the paper.
Does that answer your question?