SACEM's Jean-Noel Tronc elected President of GESAC

By Emmanuel Legrand

SACEM chief executive Jean-Noël Tronc has been elected President of GESAC, the European groupment of societies of authors, during the organisation's annual General Meeting. Tronc will serve for a two-year term. He replaces José Jorge Letria, President of Portuguese society Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores (SPA), who remains on the board of GESAC.

  Tronc said his mandate will focus first and foremost on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the creative sector. “For authors, composers and music publishers that GESAC is fighting for, the COVID crisis strikes two times: they have lost massive direct revenues with confinement, they will lose major authors’ rights revenues in 2021, because of the delayed impact of 2020 losses for the users of their works, be it shops, media, live concerts, movie theaters, physical sales or exhibitions," said Tronc.

  He added, “The authors societies that GESAC represents will be also financially more fragile because of the fall in collections that will weaken their resources. We need to rethink EU priorities and make Culture and creation a vivid priority for the recovery plans and the EU Commission, Parliament and Governments agenda. In that perspective, GESAC carries and important responsibility: it represents creators from all arts and all origins; non profit collective management of rights is a European invented model where European authors societies still play a worldwide acknowledged leading role."

  Tronc will be chairing the GESAC Board, alongside three new Vice-Presidents, who were also elected at the meeting: Victor Finn, CEO of Irish authors’ society IMRO, András Szinger, CEO of Hungarian authors’ society Artisjus, and Harald Heker, CEO of German authors’ society GEMA. The GESAC Board also includes: Gaetano Blandini, CEO of SIAE (Italy), Karsten Dyhrberg Nielsen, CEO of STIM (Sweden), Gernot Graninger, CEO of AKM/Austromechana (Austria), and Carine Libert, CEO of SABAM (Belgium). GESAC regroups 32 of the largest authors’ societies in the European Union, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.