History

One man, Ernest Bourget, was alone and took on everyone. In 1847 he succeeded in having payment made for his work which was being played in the most fashionable café-concert at the time, Les Ambassadeurs. He had the courts recognize these legitimate rights founded in revolutionary laws. The provisional union of authors, composers and publishers of music was thus established in 1850, and one year later, the professional union became a society [société civile] comprised of members – authors, composers and publishers who divided the author’s rights collected amongst the members in an equitable way, and this rule has been maintained to the present day. And so SACEM was founded.

Before long the repertoire extended beyond the realms of the café-concert to include other types of music. Within twenty-five years, Sacem was joined by names both great and small in the history of music and the arts: Gioacchino Rossini, Hector Berlioz, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, Maurice Ravel, Georges Bizet, Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saens, Jacques Offenbach and Aristide Bruant, and also Victor Hugo, Eugène Labiche, Jules Verne, Théophile Gautier, Alphonse Daudet and many others. SACEM currently has 106 000 members of many different nationality, covering repertoire that is regional, national and international. It has become the crossroads for all the different musical genres.

The Paris-based organization became national (with 181 branches by 1858) and before long was international (Belgium, Switzerland, Great Britain, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire and other countries). Working through these branches, SACEM also contributed to the development of other national societies of authors.
Expansion

In the early twentieth century, SACEM kept pace with major technological changes, thereby introducing new sources of rights to be collected: there was the development of the phonograph and the wireless, the emergence of moving pictures and music to accompany moving pictures, and of course the recognition of mechanical reproduction rights, these being managed by a new collecting society, Sdrm, which later joined SACEM.

In 1950, SACEM’s centenary year, the society, which had had only 221 members in 1850, had a total of 15 000 authors, composers and publishers of music, and distributed rights collected on 25 million works. This was a time of radical change, particularly with “mechanical music”: juke boxes, microgroove phonographs, radio and the first television pictures which soon dominated, ahead of live music.

In the same decade the law on intellectual property (passed in 1957) brought legislative recognition for a right which had been greatly contested. It has since been extended, both in French law and European Union legislation and this has meant that SACEM has been able to tackle new European and international challenges. At the same time the organization has been modernizing itself, building up social and professional policy, restructuring the network in the provinces, setting up new internal entities and focusing on a policy of cooperation with societies of authors outside France, in particular for major international negotiations with the new players in the music industry.

With the advent of the new media, works travel faster. After frequency modulation, there were the early days of community radio; CDs replaced vinyl disks and by the 1990s digital technology had prevailed. Today there is the challenge of the Internet, new technologies and globalization of authors’ rights, a challenge that must be taken up and carried off successfully by all authors, composers and publishers.