For the past several years, the organizations that collect public performance royalties have been growing far faster than most of the music business, especially in Europe. Revenue at the French collective management organization SACEM.
As competition among societies heats up, the most important few are pulling away from the rest. PRS, GEMA and STIM operate ICE as a Berlin-based pan-European licensing hub, and most publishers and other societies license online rights in Europe and other countries either through it or SACEM, which is a hub in its own right. That means at least some of the growth at those societies is coming at the expense of their European competitors, although it’s hard to tell how much.