The Clubs Are Dying
You know that feeling when an institution suddenly starts actively ruining something? That’s what’s happening with GEMA in Germany right now. They’re the music rights collective—basically a monopoly that collects royalties whenever a song plays in public. Makes sense on paper. Except they’ve decided to charge clubs and discos between 600 and 2000 percent more in licensing fees starting this year. Not gradually. Not negotiated. Just decided, and now it’s law.
The numbers are almost absurd. A small club’s licensing fees go from manageable to impossible. So the club closes. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening. The scene is collapsing because one bureaucratic outfit squeezed too hard.
What gets me is the stupidity of it. GEMA exists to support musicians. Their entire reason for existing is to make sure artists get paid. But their fee structure guarantees fewer people hear music, fewer venues book bands, fewer scenes exist. They maximize their own revenue while destroying the ecosystem that makes that revenue possible in the first place. It’s self-sabotage with a spreadsheet.
Years ago, you heard new music at clubs. DJs, live bands, the full thing. Those venues were where scenes happened. Some random Tuesday you’d see a band that changed everything. GEMA just priced that out of existence. Or most of it.
The real kick is the powerlessness. GEMA’s a monopoly. They set prices, make rules, decide what’s legal. You can protest, petition, yell online, and none of it matters because they’re not a competitor you can avoid—they’re effectively the government. It’s like watching a parasite slowly kill its host and being unable to stop it.
I don’t know what happens next. Maybe the clubs survive somehow. Maybe people stop going out. Maybe both. But whatever it is, something dies. A scene is a delicate thing. You can’t rebuild it from a database. You can’t manufacture the moment someone hears a song for the first time and it rewires them. That only happens in real venues with real moments. And GEMA just priced those moments out of existence.