Direct licensing and distribution

STIM direct licensing constitutes pan-European licensing of STIM's repertoire directly to digital music services available in Europe, instead of multiple licenses, collection and re-distribution through the local society in each country.

The purpose of STIM direct licensing is to streamline, shorten and simplify the distribution of remuneration from the music service to composers/songwriters with fewer intermediaries and thus lower administrative deductions. In order to implement digital direct licensing, STIM withdrew online rights from its reciprocal agreements with the European societies.

STIM is however only able to make direct payments to rights holders which have a direct contractual relationship with STIM, i.e. affiliated composers/song writers, publishers and affiliated national societies. Payments to original publishers and sub-publishers that are not STIM affiliates are made through local societies, working as intermediaries.

In order to avoid the necessity of paying out royalties, belonging to foreign sub-publishers, through local societies working as intermediaries, which defeats the aims of STIM direct licensing, certain adjustments to the application of STIMS present regulations governing royalty distributions will be needed.

We are now investigating the possibility of distributing royalties belonging to sub-publishers outside of the Nordic and Baltic countries (our home territory) directly to the respective original publisher. Our aim is to avoid royalties being processed unnecessarily through intermediaries with resulting deductions for administration costs.