Chris Bryant
MP for Rhondda and Ogmore · Labour · United Kingdom
“I detected the Duran Duran quotes there. It is important that we are able to secure mutual recognition of professional standards; otherwise, we do not have full business mobility. That is one of the key things we are trying to sort out with the European Union at the moment.”
“Or deviate. Or repeat! I do not want to exaggerate, but this may be the most significant iconic moment for the UK and Switzerland since Sean Connery and Ursula Andress met one another in “Dr. No” back in 1962. [ Interruption ] —no exaggeration at all, of any kind.”
“The outcomes of the deal will support the discovery and development of new medicines, and it does not change UK legislation or practice, maintaining the existing balance between supporting pharmaceutical innovation and the NHS’s access to lower-cost generic medicines.”
“On top of this, we know that Swiss-owned businesses employed around 150,000 people in the UK in 2024, and bilateral foreign direct investment stood at £87 billion at the end of 2024. The agreement we have reached ensures that job creation and investment will continue to grow as our bilateral trade grows.”
“Of course, we also have to protect key sectors, and we will never compromise on animal welfare or food standards just to get a deal. This last year, this Government have made good on that responsibility. We secured the best deal with the USA of any country in the world.”
“One of the great things about Northern Ireland, of course, is that it gets the double benefit of being both in the European single market and in the UK’s single market. That has undoubted benefits. If I could point to one tiny area where having left the European Union has caused us an enormous headache this year, it would be steel.”
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“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for what she said about Dickon. He was really very helpful at Universal in the process of getting us to this place, particularly on the issue of per diems—the £75 a day—which was one of the major asks of the Ivors Academy, and I am really pleased we were able to do that. She is right that we need to look at session musicians, and of one of the undertakings I have made is that I will be getting the BPI and the Musicians’ Union together to discuss that matter again this autumn. I hope that will be in the first couple of weeks of September.”
“I am grateful for the comments about my tie. I would say that it is understated compared to some of the other ties I have worn, so I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his commendation on my sartorial elegance. But he is wrong about YouTube. YouTube is one of the streaming services and people are remunerated. One could argue that they should be remunerated more, but if people are breaching copyright, that is an offence and it needs to be pursued. Record labels are pretty keen on doing so on behalf of their artists, but, as I say, YouTube is one of the streaming outlets.”
“The argument for doing this is partly because all musicians simply do not earn enough to make a living. That is the truth of the matter. Having 12 million streamings might equate to earning a theoretical amount of money, but the musician will not earn that amount because it will be diluted by the various processes it goes through—the money the agent takes and all the rest of it. Maybe that is why so many artists have produced songs about poverty—even Destiny’s Child, with “Bills, Bills, Bills”. It has been an obsession for many artists. There is sometimes the impression that an artist, in music or in any other creative industry, can only be really good if they have struggled a bit, but the truth is that we want people to be able to make a living out of their creative industry.”
“But of course, for millions of people in the UK—even for the Swiftie over there on the Opposition Benches, the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis)—I am sure that streaming is a convenient way of accessing music that they might never have come across otherwise.”
“The one bit we have not been able to address is the amount of money that goes from the streamers themselves directly to the record labels. That is an international settlement, so it is more difficult for us to address. There was a time, when I first arrived in the House, when musicians were getting absolutely nothing and the amount of money going to record labels and musicians fell off a cliff because of pirated music. Spotify and other streaming services then came into the equation and managed to rectify some of that, but the situation is far from ideal. I wish more of the money was going directly to the artists. It is my own personal decision that I do not stream music; I buy music, because I think more of the money goes to the artists that way.”
“Songwriters from across the UK sometimes do have to travel into London for song camps, writing camps or whatever, and making sure they get their expenses plus a per diem is a really important part of ensuring that this does not just apply to some people in our cities.”
“I commend Mr Wardrobe, who has made the room where it happens musically. I commend all music teachers. I remember when I was at school, our music teacher decided that the boys’ choir should sing a song from a musical. Unfortunately, it included the lines, “I don’t know how to love him…And I’ve loved so many men before” and he suddenly decided that we would not be singing it anymore—so music teachers do not always get it right, but sometimes they are courageous. It is really important we ensure that this is about not just London, but the whole UK. That is one reason that it was important that we got the per diems issue sorted.”
“Yes, and I commend Acoustic Couch. I have not visited, but I am sure an invitation will be on its way very soon. We want to preserve as many of our small music venues as we possibly can. That is why we are pushing as hard as possible the idea of a £1 levy on arena tickets. I am delighted that the Royal Albert Hall announced yesterday that it will be first venue across the UK to implement that. I have pushed Live Nation to step up on this and it said, “Yes, yes, yes,” but it felt a bit like, “Maybe, maybe, maybe”, so I am still saying, “Quando, quando, quando”.”
“I’m an artist and a musician, not just a celebrity.” That balance is really important for lots of artists and musicians. They need to earn a living, but they are also artists who have their own conditions and they need to be able to pursue what lies in their heart.”
“Oh dear, the hon. Gentleman is worse than me. [ Interruption. ] Oh yes he is—and it’s not even panto season yet! [ Interruption. ] He has a very moderate tie, though. It is important that we have proper evaluation. We are in the process of working out precisely how we will do that. I have said to the group that we will convene in a year’s time. By then, we will have evaluated fully whether this has really worked. I am honestly very confident that it will deliver the goods. The hon. Gentleman says that artists are not necessarily doing it for the money. I went to see Alison Moyet at Kew Gardens a couple of weeks ago. She was absolutely magnificent. At the beginning of her set, she said, “I’m not necessarily going to play what everybody wants me to play, because this isn’t karaoke.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We need to ensure that the new measures are implemented. As I say, I do not want to undermine confidence in that, because I do not want to give anybody a get-out clause for not implementing them. We will be working over the next few weeks with both the BPI and the Association of Independent Music on putting together a proper evaluation process over the next year, and I hope I will be making a statement in a year’s time—although obviously that will not be up to me—on precisely how it has worked out. As I said earlier, I reckon this is worth several tens of millions of pounds of extra investment in the British music industry, and I think we will see that it has delivered. Just returning to the issue of my tie, Madam Deputy Speaker: it is a Day of the Dead tie by Van Buck.”
“The point I made about the remuneration of musicians, and all forms of artists, applies equally to streaming and to AI. The Secretaries of State for Culture, Media and Sport and for Science, Innovation and Technology held their first meeting last week with the creative industries and AI companies to discuss how we proceed on the issue of AI and copyright. There is a broadly outlined set of principles, one of which is undoubtedly that those who made the original work must be remunerated when it is used to create some other form of work and some other form of value. I agree with my hon. Friend on his point about empty spaces on the Opposition Benches—empty chairs at empty tables.”
“I am not sure whether he is intending to buy it himself. Of course, many acts have appeared on the pier over the years. My hon. Friend makes the point again about the importance of having small venues where people can perform to start and build their career and end up as the kind of household successes that we know. Not everybody will earn millions from music, but we do want many more people to be able to make a decent living out of their music in the UK. Establishing good terms of trade and having a strong copyright regime is absolutely key to delivering that. The Musicians’ Union was a key part of the discussions that we held throughout the last year.”
“Well, I am “All Cried Out” that I was not on my hon. Friend’s list of national treasures. He makes a very important point. We need to ensure that these changes apply across the whole of the United Kingdom. In her performance at Kew, Alison Moyet also made the point that every child is a musician and an artist until they are persuaded not to be at some point in their life. This is what I really want to embrace in everything that the Government do in this area, in relation to the creative industries; we talk about film and the big, famous successes that we have in the UK, but actually, a lot of it is about real hard graft by people who have had to learn how to perform well, what it is to be in front of an audience, how it is to market their performance and all the rest of it. It is tough, tough, tough.”