SABAM

Licensing GuruHits five-second song clips took a nearly four-year correspondence (1998–2001) with SABAM, Belgium’s authors-rights society, because no online-music tariff existed yet — making it one of the first licensed online music-clip services in Belgium.

Licensing a music quiz in 1998 meant asking a question nobody had answered yet. Belgium had no tariff for music on the internet, and the society that would have to grant permission — SABAM, the Belgian authors' rights society — was still inventing one. What follows is the paper trail: four years of letters, in three languages, that turned a hobby into a licensed, paying, legal online service.

A question with no answer yet (1998)

It began on 9 April 1998 with a student's email and a common assumption. Joe described a music game — guess the singer and title from the first ten seconds of each song in his CD collection — and asked the question that everything turned on: he had read, years before, that you could use up to fifteen seconds of a song without paying royalties. Was that still correct?

It was not. SABAM's reply two weeks later set the tone for everything that followed: permission is required no matter how short the clip, and SABAM itself was only just drafting an experimental online regime — to be billed on the total duration of the music used.

Those two phrases — "however minimal its duration" and pricing "on the basis of the total duration of the music used" — shaped the whole design of GuruHits: five-second clips, and a catalogue measured in minutes. The same day, Joe wrote back describing the project — a multiple-choice quiz on the first seconds of each song, with points and a global ranking (and even a harder mode with the songs played backwards). His own reasons for keeping the clips short had nothing to do with licensing yet:

Bandwidth and difficulty came first; the licensing-cost logic would reinforce exactly the same choice three years later. And the cost was on Joe's mind from the very start: in a May 1998 ideas memo to his father, the music-quiz concept already carried a one-word flag next to it — "Problem: SABAM? Kosten?". While SABAM went quiet over the following weeks, the family mapped the wider Belgian rights landscape — SCAM, SOFAM, and the then-new Reprobel — before SABAM's terms finally took shape.

The first real terms (1999)

A year on, with still no published tariff, Joe pressed for specifics. SABAM's Média department gave the first concrete answer: a Belgian company needs SABAM's authorization wherever its audio is hosted, subdomains without audio need none, lyrics must be cleared separately with the publishers, and the list of works is declared twice a year.

Bringing in a lawyer (2000–2001)

By 2000 the project was real enough to need legal advice. Joe brought in Tom Heremans — then at Allen & Overy in Brussels, today a partner at CMS — whose letters to and from Joe are in the sources below. The principle that decided everything was simple: royalties follow the company's registered seat, not the server. Just before launch, his full opinion identified two ways SABAM could classify the site — a cheap "online record-shop window" rate versus a per-minute "music promotion" tariff — and spotted that the contract said nothing about which works filled the licensed hour. The catalogue could rotate freely under a fixed duration cap.

The dead-ends that fixed the path (2001)

Two alternatives were tested and closed in the weeks before launch. The neighbouring-rights bodies — which represent performers and producers, not composers — were the first stop. Joe wrote directly to Rémunération Équitable (SIMIM), noting that SABAM's contract did not cover those rights for online broadcast (and, in passing, that the song bank already held 695 tracks from a 1,500-CD collection):

The reply was another dead-end: they had no online tariff at all, only rates for radio. And licensing through a foreign society, Germany's GEMA, proved impossible for the same reason SABAM had given in 1999: online use is licensed where the provider is established.

With forum-shopping ruled out, a Belgian SABAM licence was the only road — and GuruHits launched on 20 September 2001.

Confirmed, then closed (2003–2014)

In 2003 SABAM put the arrangement in writing in the clearest possible terms: a fifteen-minute cap, with the works free to change week to week underneath it — exactly what Heremans had predicted.

GuruHits ran on that basis for over a decade. In 2014 Joe wound it down — the streaming switched off, the contract closed at the end of the year, after roughly thirteen years online.

Primary sources

The full set of recovered letters, in chronological order. Original-language excerpts are quoted verbatim from the archive, with English translations beneath; third parties are shown by first name and initial.