Team size: 25 in the Paris headquarters, eight additional staff in regional offices in Asia-Pacific, Africa, Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean

Can you tell us a little about your significant accomplishments over the last few years, as a team or by yourself?

In my role, I oversee the operations of an international organisation that brings together 230 authors’ societies from 120 countries, who together represent over 4-million creators of music, films and TV series, visual art, dramatic works and literature.

A big part of our work is legal and policy, and I am closely involved in these and in shaping our international strategy around lobbying for new legislation and international treaties, government relations and policy advocacy.

Over the past two years we have focused on adapting to the changing landscape of the creative industries, as a result of Covid-19. Many of the income streams of artists and creators have stopped, as live concert venues shut down and public places that license and use music have closed their doors during lockdowns. We reacted by immediately shifting our efforts and attention to the digital market, concentrating on helping our members extract higher value from digital music and audio-visual streaming platforms, to offset the decline in other revenues.

We have made efforts to launch and make available to our members improved systems to support identification of digital content, and collection and distribution of royalties. We also set up an information hub to exchange data on the Covid-19 situation and its impact on different markets, the measures adopted by governments and actions taken by authors’ societies to support individual artists. This information was useful in lobbying for stronger government support around the world. We also cooperated with international UN agencies such as UNESCO and WIPO to raise awareness among decision-makers on the need to help local creative sectors and include them in aid packages by governments.

Have any recent political, economic or regulatory changes impacted your work? How are you dealing with this?

As an international organisation, global politics always have an impact on our work.

The war in Ukraine was one recent example. Shortly after the Russian invasion it became clear to us that we should take action to support the local creative community and the many artists who fled Ukraine. We quickly announced three projects: the first was a global fund, which raised over €1.5m to date and was distributed to over one-thousand individual Ukrainian creators, as well as support financially the efforts to host refugees in neighbouring countries such as Poland. We also launched a project titled “Songs for Ukraine” to promote Ukrainian music over streaming services and thereby increase royalty income to their creators. The third project was an open letter signed by over 4000 artists and composers, to express the global creators community’s solidarity with the people of Ukraine. The letter was sent to many governments around the world.