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After Playing a Part in the Weirdest Scam in Music, This Organization Is Making Good on Its Comeback

SGAE's comeback: After a strange scheme, it's a player once more.

Over the years, the collective management organization combined larger-than-life misbehavior (“Going to brothels after dinner was normal,” former senior executive Pedro Farré told El País in 2017) with an only-in-the-entertainment-business royalty accounting scheme called “la rueda” (the wheel) in which television companies played music to which they controlled the rights on late-night shows at barely audible levels in order to get back some of the money they paid SGAE in royalties. How much of this was amusing, as opposed to outrageous, varied directly with whether any of the money belonged to your company or creators with whom you worked, and in May 2019 the collecting society trade association CISAC took the unusual step of ejecting SGAE. That seemed to put more urgency behind the reforms that were already taking place, and two years later SGAE rejoined CISAC and began to rebuild the trust of creators, publishers and other CMOs.

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