Opera is an exception within the creative economy because it relies on a large body of popular public domain works for which the copyright has expired; a unique scenario which isn’t the case for many other creative fields.

Generally speaking, professional opera companies often share performance venues with other performing art companies, including ballet or spoken theatre, and in many places rely heavily on public funding.

This means the number of performances that can be staged is limited.

On an economic level, the fixed amount of performance slots increases the competition between works of opera, especially between established works in the public domain and new operas.

Is copyright also affecting which works are staged more often today and influencing how opera houses are choosing their repertoire?

Does copyright actually encourage the creation and promotion of new opera works?

In principle, copyright grants composers with exclusive rights to capitalize on their works for the copyright term. Licensing income should allow them to recuperate their initial investment and go on to create more new work.

In the case of opera, however, this logic might not always hold up.

New, avant-garde works tend to attract smaller crowds and sell at lower ticket prices compared to the many popular works in the public domain. Opera houses have low expected revenues from these performances so the cost of licensing them from composers becomes too high.

All this can hinder the discovery of new works as they cannot grow in popularity on stages. In turn, this limits licensing income for these contemporary composers, which ultimately drives them to create fewer new works.

In the end, it’s the conundrum of the chicken or the egg.

Without copyright, innovative new operas wouldn’t be created in the first place; yet with copyright, we could end up with fewer and fewer of these new operas making it onto the stage.

So what exactly is the effect of copyright protection on staging? What can be done to help new operas find their audience?

When it comes to new and experimental performances of opera, budgeting tends to be particularly tight and the commercial risk is higher.

Data from opera revivals in the early 20th century show that copyright status affects the staging of new opera from early on, right after their premiere, and it restricts how popular the work can become.

So copyright may act as a barrier to entry and licensing cost hurdle for new, more avant-garde operas, particularly for new productions that are outside of an opera house’s standard production repertoire.

In order to discover new opera, it is critical that these new works are performed on stage so they can gain recognition and popularity among audiences.

In many countries, rights are negotiated between opera houses and composers on a case-by-case basis. This can make things more costly to negotiate for everyone involved.

Deals and fees could be more easily streamlined and optimized under collective management via an organization that would represent composers and their interests to opera houses.

If a collective management system were to be implemented in opera licensing, the savings would have to outweigh the costs of having such a system in place.