Israeli recording artists seek government funding
Music industry professionals join in legislative push, seeking the same support Israeli cinema gets
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
Israel’s film industry has long counted on government funding to help finance productions, and now leading recording artists want the same kind of support.
The proposed legislation, which they’re calling Israel’s Music Law similar to the Israeli Film Law, would create government budgets that will help preserve and stabilize Israel’s music industry.
The effort is supported by artists Micha Shitrit, Shuli Rand, Miri Mesika, Kobi Oz, Shai Tsabari, Nitzan Zeira and others, with the help and support of Inbar Nacht, an attorney whose Inbar and Marius Nacht Family Foundation has been working on this initiative for the past year.
(Marius Nacht, Inbar Nacht’s husband, co-founded Check Point Software, and is regarded as one of the founding fathers of Israel’s cybersecurity industry.)
“Israeli music has to get its place in the world, like theater, like film, like the culinary arts,” said Oz. “It can’t be that all those artists get to succeed outside Israel, but musical artists don’t. If I can listen to a ton of music from Brazil, there’s no reason that [musician] Matti Caspi can’t be known elsewhere.”
In 2000, the government passed a New Cinema Law to secure more funding for local cinema, a factor that pushed Israeli films onto global screens.
“The film law jumpstarted Israel’s film industry,” said Nachman Rosenberg, CEO of the Inbar and Marius Nacht Family Foundation. “That’s why you see [TV] shows like ‘Fauda’ [streamed internationally by Netflix] and the same could happen with Israeli music.”
The Nacht Foundation funds many cultural initiatives, including the remastering of 62 classic Israeli tracks performed by 80 leading Israeli artists and employing more than 1,000 music industry staffers during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Throughout the course of the pandemic music projects, Nacht became aware of challenges faced by the music industry, including what some would call a lack of commitment on the part of the government to help preserve Israeli music.
“If you want to have Israeli culture, you need music in there,” said Rosenberg. “We need to reorganize and redefine the local music industry to better preserve it going forward.”
Nacht and her team of lawyers began started worked on potential legislation together with local artists, managers and producers.
Part of the problem stems from a lack of regulation in Israel, said Oz. Major organizations, from schools to television channels, often use Israeli artists’ music for free and it’s difficult for solo artists to fight them.
“You want your songs to make money for you, but you don’t have a big enough audience here in Israel to do that. It’s not like the US,” said Oz. “There’s just no regulation… and it’s the job of working artists to do this for those who came before us and those who will come after.”
Oz and the other artists, along with Nacht’s Rosenberg, met with Culture Minister Chili Tropper, who said he was committed to working with them to push the bill forward.
“He told us this kind of work would have taken the government ten years to do,” said Rosenberg.
Their committee now needs to approach Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman, added Rosenberg.
“We want to make the case why this is an industry that deserves some government support and why it would be a smart investment,” he said. “It’s in the Culture Ministry’s jurisdiction. Once Tropper gave the green light and blessing, we can pivot and try to get it into the next state budget.”
