5. Finances

As Dr. Walravens explained there was some concern about the financial future of the ISMN system. So far the large agencies carried the major burden and some of them were unhappy with that. This led to discussions about a proper quota system. The aim was to let every agency pay its fare share. There were several solutions and problems:

• The quota could be based on the number of assigned prefixes. But this would mean that very active agencies were going to be punished for their efforts.
• The quota could be based on the number of the music publications in a country.
• There might be a reason to waive membership fees for some time for some countries: It seemed much more important to support the developing of Eastern European countries and include them into the system than to wait until they might have found funding. Furthermore, especially the Eastern European countries were basically willing to contribute.
• Payment in some countries might be a problem because of the structure of the music market. E.g. in Italy where there was only one large publisher who wanted to use the system. Meanwhile, Ricordi was sold to Bertelsmann New York, and the former arrangement of contributing to the ISMN costs was not acknowledged.

Mr. Müller suggested that a small working group should work on this item. Members of this group would be: W. Robert Müller himself, Sarah Faulder, François Leduc, and Michael Cairns.