Johannes,
Here's how the situation normally works with an independent jazz-
based label:
1) You organize and pay for the recording yourself, including mixing
and mastering. The record company pays for none of this.
2) The record company takes 50% of the publishing rights for every
composition on the record. If you don't agree to this, no deal.
3) The record company then owns the rights to the recording you paid
for, and can do whatever they want with it. They determine how the
music is packaged and marketed They can sit on it and not release it.
They can sell the rights to a different label. They can put a track
from your album on a compilation with artists you do not want to be
associated with. They determine whether any of the tracks will be
sold online, and if so, in what format. They control whether the CD
will have digital rights management software on it, something which
often causes a massive backlash -- this happened to a number of Sony
artists last year, without their knowledge or consent. And they can
unilaterally yank it from the market forever, with no option for you
to recover your masters. And if you don't agree, no deal.
Is this fair? You can say that artists shouldn't sign these
contracts, but artists (especially new artists) have virtually no
negotiating power. The record company is in the position to dictate
terms, and the terms they dictate are all designed to strip the
artist of ownership and control of her own creative work. You can
always self-release (and many more people are now going that route),
but this will effectively shut you out of major clubs and festivals,
who will simply not even consider booking you unless you have a
recording on a "respected" record label.
This arrangement is much worse than the closest parallel arrangement
-- book publishing. An author has much more control over her
manuscript, and the underlying rights to the novel reside with the
author, not the publisher. I don't see why the underlying rights to a
recording should reside with the record company, when frequently, the
record company did not pay a dime to finance the recording in the
first place.
The American Federation of Musicians is useless in this regard. They
protect minimum hourly rates for session musicians working recording
sessions at major labels, but that's about it. They do absolutely
nothing to help protect composers/songwriters leading their own
ensembles and recording their own music. (There was a recent
exception when guitarist Marc Ribot was able to persuade AFM Local
802 to provide legal and organizational assistance to the Knitting
Factory Records artists, but collaborations between the union and
creative musicians remain rare.)
I don't know if copyright law reform is the best solution, or some
other form of legislation would be preferable, but the current
situation is very bad for artists and saying "well, just don't sign
that contract!" is not a solution. Fortunately, it's entirely
possible that record companies as we know them will cease to exist
within the next ten years. Good riddance.
Cheers,
- Darcy
-----
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://secretsociety.typepad.com
Brooklyn, NY
On 05 Dec 2006, at 4:15 AM, Johannes Gebauer wrote:
On 05.12.2006 Darcy James Argue wrote:
Not just "anyone" -- the artist who created the work. If I
recorded an album of my own compositions with my own ensemble, and
you decide to release it on your label, but then after six months
(or a year, or even ten years), you decide you want to take it out
of circulation, you're damn right I will want to come along and
reissue it myself. And you should not, legally or morally, be
allowed to prevent me.
Sorry, but I simply don't agree. If you want to issue a recording
of yourself you can do so, you just need the cash to do it. The
record company simply functions as a company, it wants to make a
profit. Unfortunately too many artists have agreed to work under
their conditions, now we have the situation where they dictate
them. But this is not the fault of the copyright legislation. If
anything you can blame your union. At least you have one, we don't
have one in Germany (at least not one which protects freelance
workers like me).
A lot of things are wrong in the recording world, but the copyright
legislation is not to blame imo. At least not for this.
And I am afraid signing away your masters is something you do have
a choice in. And I have never heard of any artists dieing of lost
masters desease.
Johannes
--
http://www.musikmanufaktur.com
http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de
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