There's little love lost between the European Commission and the collecting society community, we all know that.

As much previously reported, the former have been pushing the collecting societies of Europe on various issue for a while now, including the need to provide digital music providers with pan-European licences, the need for more transparency in their operations, and the need for a more competitive market place. Some EC officials reckon that, until recently, European collecting societies were operating in a cartel fashion, with each society having a monopoly over music rights in their native territory.

The collecting societies, while generally conceding that there is a need for pan-European licensing in the digital age, reject many of the European Commission's accusations, and argue that the EC's plans for make the collecting society sector more competitive and transparent will make things less competitive and less transparent.

The outgoing boss of the global membership organisation for publishing rights collecting societies, CISAC, Eric Baptiste, made that point as he opened his session at MIDEM yesterday. He argued that the European Commission's demands on his sector where contradictory, while the boss of French society SACEM, Bernard Miyet, added: "We have no clear picture of what the European Commission wants us collecting societies to do".

As previously reported, a number of the bigger music publishers have struck deals with one or another, or sometimes several, of the European collecting societies which give said societies the rights to licence their catalogues in multiple territories, a move towards pan-European licensing. However, some argue that because different publishers do such deals with different collecting societies, it doesn't make it any easier for digital service providers, who still have to acquire a number of different licences for Europe, they just do so on a catalogue by catalogue basis rather than country by country.

And, in fact, because the pan-European licences generally only apply to the Anglo-American catalogues owned by the big publishers, licensees still need to go to each national collecting society separately to secure local catalogues, meaning the total number of deals done increases. Plus, arguably, the smaller collecting societies lose out because they can't compete to secure the more lucrative pan-European deals with the major publishing houses. And whatever happens the wider collecting society sector becomes more rather than less confusing.

According to Billboard, the boss of Belgian collecting society SABAM, Christophe Depreter, observed: "So far, we are totally unsatisfied. The only thing that is clear is that nothing is clear. In fact, not only is digital licensing not clear, so far, it makes life more difficult for everyone. It is more difficult for the user; life is more difficult for the collective management society, and of course life is much more difficult for our members [ie songwriters] because they have to wait longer for the remuneration".

Of course, EC officials might argue that a lot of the current confusion is because the collecting society system is in a state of flux, as it moves from the old system (based around one society licensing music in each territory) to the new system (based around each national society offering pan-European services). If and when all European collecting societies offer both niche and all-embracing licences in all European territories, then things will be much clearer and much more competitive. Though whether that will ever happen remains to be seen.

PRS For Music's Jeremy Fabinyi was more positive than most during the MIDEM session. While conceding the whole sector was in a bit of a mess at the moment, he said that the old way of doing things wasn't much better, concluding that in the digital age: "You are either going to crash or crash through, we have decided to crash through".