Spotify interviews STIM's songwriter outreach specialists

Aside from managing the rights of your music and collecting royalties, there are many things that a performing rights society can do to support and advance your career. But taking full advantage of those resources almost always requires you to proactively get involved and work with them to get what you need. 

STIM is a performing rights society based out of Stockholm, Sweden that has been around for nearly a century, and represents some of the world’s biggest songwriters in a country that is the third largest exporter of music in the world. As songwriter outreach specialists at STIM, Ida Staxenius and Anton Waltari have extensive experience in the music industry and both take pride in their ability to offer support and guidance to both upcoming and established songwriters. They’re not only tasked with encouraging these creators to join STIM, but also focus on getting them to make use of the many resources STIM offers.

Noteable sat down with Ida and Anton to discuss the importance of getting involved with a performing rights society, misconceptions surrounding rights societies, and reasons why you may want to consider joining a society outside your region. 

Can you tell us a bit about your roles at STIM?

Ida: What we do depends on the songwriters we’re working with. We work with data, extracting lists so we can see where people are in their career and try to meet the needs that they have - we can see if you are a big songwriter, if you’re a new songwriter, or if you're in between. But we also offer know-how and networking. Both Anton and I have worked at different labels, and management agencies, so a lot of our outreach to songwriters comes from our existing relationships.

Anton: We become a place of comfort where people can feel more relaxed and if they want to have a meeting to work through a difficult situation, they can do it from our space because everyone is represented by STIM—the songwriters, the publishers, the clients. So we have kind of a cool role that way.

How does STIM work with Spotify?

Anton: We work with Spotify to hash out ideas on how we can promote publishing and make sure that songwriters are on top of all of their publishing rights, but also how Spotify can provide more exposure to our songwriters. Things like song credits and songwriter pages.

Ida: We also created a masterclass together with Spotify and IFPI, which is the organization that handles master rights in Sweden. We talked about how all of these parties in the industry work together, and these sorts of programs have been really great for reaching the young songwriters before they start out. We’re trying to avoid a scenario where a songwriter has a world hit and then joins STIM three years later. 

Read the full interview with Ida and Anton at the Noteable website >