SIAE still holds 99.2 percent of Italy’s songwriter royalty market by the regulator’s count, but writers can now move some or all rights to a for-profit rival.
That figure comes from AGCOM’s delibera 142/25/CONS, dated 27 May 2025. AGCOM means Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni, Italy’s communications regulator. It gave SIAE 99.20 percent of music authors’ rights and LEA, the non-profit society Soundreef worked through until 2024, 0.80 percent.
The count uses three years of past collections. Soundreef chief executive Davide D’Atri told Il Sole 24 Ore (Francesco Prisco, 17 June 2025) that its weight “fluctuates between 3 and 4 per cent of the market.”
How SIAE’s monopoly ended
Italian law has let other collective management organisations compete with SIAE since 2017, but it kept IMEs out. IME means independent management entity: a for-profit collector not owned by the rightsholders it represents.
- On 21 March 2024 the EU Court of Justice ruled in case C-10/22, LEA v Jamendo, that a blanket ban on IMEs from other member states breaches the freedom to provide services (IPKat, Antonios Baris).
- Italy answered with Article 15 of Decree-Law 131/2024, converted by Law 166 of 14 November 2024, which wrote IMEs into Article 180 of the copyright law.
- AGCOM’s register, updated 15 April 2026, shows Soundreef International Limited, an Irish company, filing as an IME on 24 December 2024. LEA was dissolved from 1 January 2025.
The rules that decide a switch
Under Article 4 of Legislative Decree 35/2017, a rightsholder can hand rights, categories of rights or territories to any CMO or IME. CMO means collective management organisation, the member-based model SIAE follows.
- A revocation can be total or partial, on four to six months’ notice, and may take effect only at the end of the collector’s financial year.
- SIAE fixes the date: a withdrawal or a limitation by category or territory received by 31 August takes effect on 1 January.
- A limitation does not bind co-writers or publishers who stay with SIAE.
On that rule, a request that reaches SIAE on 1 September waits 16 months. Spain lists 24 SGAE rights you can withdraw one at a time, while Israel’s ACUM only allows opt-outs by whole category.
A split repertoire means split licences
There is no joint licence. SIAE’s own guidance to venues says every user must check which collector manages the music it plays and get a permit from each.
That is the real trade-off: moved rights only earn where the new collector actually licenses the venues playing your songs.
Co-written songs split the same way, with each share following its writer’s collector. Writers abroad are affected too: SESAC moved its Italian mandate to Soundreef from 1 January 2024.
The numbers to weigh
- SIAE: 1.022 billion euros of revenue in 2025, 849 million distributed (up 15 percent), 125,744 members and an average commission of 13.7 percent, per its 2025 annual report. Membership is free for authors aged up to 30.
- Soundreef: 43,000 rightsholders, 26,000 of them Italian, and a 25 million euro revenue forecast for 2025, per Il Sole 24 Ore (Prisco, 4 December 2024).
The 2024 decree also requires an IME’s membership terms to state its profit motive, how it splits money, any different treatment between members, and any conflicts of interest. Within 90 days of its payout deadline, on a reasoned request, it must list works whose owners it could not identify.
Labels selling into Italy’s growing physical market got one change from the same law: the SIAE sticker is no longer mandatory on CDs and vinyl.
What to do before 31 August
- List your rights by category (live, background, broadcast, online) and decide which a smaller collector can actually license.
- Ask any IME for its Article 4 membership conditions in writing before signing.
- Agree with co-writers and your publisher who collects what.
- Keep writer and publisher names identical across society registrations and release metadata.
That last point is where distribution comes in. InterSpace Distribution’s DDEX-native delivery carries the composer and publisher credits you enter, so DSP reports match what your collector registered. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard DSPs ingest.
