The Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society Teosto is a copyright organization for composers, lyric writers, arrangers and music publishers in Finland. Teosto provides licensing products for performing and reproducing music that in their words "meets the needs of music using customers, and distributes the royalties to the rightholders - the music authors."

Teosto is commonly known to have a stiff structure, and consequently Teosto agreements may sometimes present problems for composers who e.g. want to cross between paid and unpaid work or, for example want to showcase their works online. Also, Teosto’s apparent lack of procedures for handling the lifespan of game music (the game itself, marketing material, derivatory products like soundtracks, their marketing material, etc.) and a narrow understanding for the particular practical conventions of the industry (for example, some game companies only hire musicians who will provide the game music as commissioned work) has made life hard for Finnish game sound people.

Teosto appears already to have unofficcially accepted certain common practises, overlooking instances such as when artists publishing one’s own music on private webpages. (Even so, commercial-but-private spaces like MySpace have been a problematic thing and may be so even in the future.) Teosto is also known to have made some individual agreements with musicians, but according to my understanding these private agreements have been a pain to negotiate and even still, the solutions have been at most inventive workaraounds to tackle the dated structures of Teosto agreements.

Now, the situation may be changing. According to a recent article in taloussanomat (in Finnish) Teosto is apparently reconsidering the limitations their deals put on musicians. The article tells us that the board of Teosto will meet as soon as April, to consider the new terms of agreements. I’m hopeful this meeting may at least put in black-on-white the unofficcially accepted practises, but even better would be if Teosto really took it upon themselves to reconsider the way the whole music licensing thing should be conducted. Either way, these are promising news for game composers. Let’s hope not only empty promises.