Il Sanremo Music Festival 2023 is ready to start, but next year would you like to watch it, instead of on Rai 1, maybe on Canale 5 or La7 or Sky or even a foreign broadcast like BBC or Canal Plus? Yes, because this eventuality is anything but remote and revealed by Striscia La Notizia, the satirical program of Mediaset’s flagship network. As the Apulian correspondent “Pinuccio” explains in his article, the agreement between Rai and the Sanremo Festival is about to expire and a new and unprecedented public tender will be needed to assign the future management of the “Festival della canzone italiana” brand which is owned by the municipality of the town in the province of Imperia.
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This was established in 2021 by a ruling of TAR from the Liguria, appealed to by AFI, the Italian Phonographic Association, which defends and collects the rights of independent record producers. The AFI has asked to be able to view the documents of this agreement, also because the RAI, being a public service body, practically finances the festival every year with citizens’ money.
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If this now customary “agreement” is not made available, the agreement is effectively illegal. Over the years, in fact, several television broadcasters have opposed which, in fact, are automatically excluded from the assignment tender. From next year, therefore, the tender will have to be public and new methods of granting the brand will have to be established, on which the mayor of Sanremo, Alberto Biancheri, has already expressed himself positively, skilled negotiator and longest-serving mayor in history to represent the Festival . In fact, he has been in office since 10 June 2014, then re-elected in 2019 and in 2024 he will conclude his mandate, in practice a ten-year anniversary of Italian music also bears his signature. For the 2023 edition, the mayor managed to assign the exclusive of the Festival to Rai for 4 million and 850 thousand euros, a cost lower than the 5 million of the previous year, however compensated by the high revenue from sponsors, around 50 million euros which represent a record, not to mention the related revenues in the province , estimated at a figure close to 20 million euros.
