With its five-year-old annual policy summit, the Future of Music Coalition has made great strides in identifying issues in business, technology, and policy affecting career musicians, "the vast majority" of whom, its organizers note, "live gig to gig, unable to afford the basic protections and securities of life that allow them to continue making their art." As independent artists develop and discover shortcuts to get their music out in spite of an inequitable and often corrupt industry, conferences like the FMC's go a long way toward providing them a map.
Many are asserting control over their creations by taking charge of their copyrights and licensing. Melissa Ferrick, in a panel on "New Label/No Label Models," illustrates one approach: Incorporate yourself, start your own label, hire your own distributors, and you'll actually see your own royalties. Hers is a touring-based model. But if you're a New York five-piece indie-rock band with sales in the four-figure range, and touring is a break-even proposition at best, the licensing-centric indie Magnatune label might be a better fit: focusing your energies on exploiting your existing catalog.
Exploiting catalog has long been the near exclusive province of ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC—performance rights organizations (PROs) whose member publishers license content to soundtracks, film school projects, commercials, and elsewhere in exchange for a hefty chunk of copyright ownership and whose blowhard honchos spent the FMC summit boasting of their support of songwriters and musicians while disingenuously pretending that all those performers own their own copyrights. Which is one reason John Buckman created Magnatune, non-exclusive and demanding no transfer of copyright. "I'm not gonna make you rich," he explains to one bandleader after a panel, "but I'll be a nice supplementary income source."
Interesting avenues are developing in emerging media for artists who control their own work. Podcasts utterly depend on such material, trapped as they are in a no-man's-land where the law doesn't know if they're downloads or performances for royalty purposes. Candace Corrigan, who podcasts a local-talent show called Nashville Nobody Knows, explained during a panel called "I Am the DJ" that she pays out fees to ASCAP and BMI to be on the safe side. However, as Ali Partovi of GarageBand observed, the PROs offer no license to podcast, so it's unknown whether they distribute those fees to the correct member artists. Safer to stick to content owned by the authors and artists themselves, most podcasters find.
That policy of using what's free and clear guides technological visionary Lucas Gonze. A programmer with roots in the peer-to-peer movement, Gonze appeared at the FMC summit to discuss Webjay, his project that helps people create playlists of audio (and some video) files that are freely available on the Web. It's as much a social-behavior experiment as a methodology for artist promotion: Gonze deals in an idealized scenario wherein the should, the unspoken moral imperative, guides interaction and music sharing. "Today I asked one of the guys from Kill Rock Stars what their should was," Gonze explains. "He said, 'Well, for every album, there's one song that we don't care what people do.'"
The material Gonze recommends for his playlisters' community is generally either public domain or Creative Commons licensed. Under Creative Commons, a growing "some rights reserved" copyright, creators set tiers at which they permit different levels of reuse, remixing, and redistribution of their work. The CC licenses make it easier to share songs (as in Webjay), sample and remix others' works (as in ccMixter), and become part of a "pod-safe" community (as in GarageBand, which has gained a new lease on life through people perusing and podcasting content).
Artists who make their music freely available in this fashion take a risk in not going for the immediate sales. But as participants in a closing panel on "The Unheard Music" note, CDs aren't exactly profit makers either. Rather, best to treat them as calling cards, use them and MySpace connections and collaboration partners to self-market. As celebrated avant-garde jazz pianist Matthew Shipp explains, if you're good at what you do, there is an audience for it. And these emerging technologies and policies are making it easier to find that audience without the major labels, bringing artists steps closer to a more desirable middle-class existence.
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deankay 06/28/2008 4:17:30 PM
Joseph McCombs does an O.K. job of reporting what happened but when he veers off into editorial comment it might be useful if he knew what he was talking about. For instance when he makes the statement "Exploiting catalog has long been the near exclusive province of ASCAP, BMI and SESAC" he displays his total ignorance as to how those organizations function. There is no "exploitation" function in what the performing rights societies do... Rights owners voluntarily assign their rights to the PROs for a limited period - in the case of ASCAP their commitment is for one year at a time. In return, the societies issues licenses to thousands upon thousand of organizations that use music, collect from those organizations, protect the owner's rights in the courts and in Washington if necessary, and pay the rights owners - in the case of ASCAP and BMI - everything they take in less overhead which is somewhere between 14 and 15 percent ... the lowest administration fees for such activities in the world. Take performing rights societies out of the mix and the rights owners would have to knock on thousands of doors and make their own deals if they ever hoped to get paid. Furthermore, the PROs have absolutely no say in the relationships between publishers and writers. They do not support publishers over writers... In fact, at ASCAP while the board is made up of writers and publishers (unique to ASCAP), the chairman of the board is always a writer and that reality is locked in stone in the by laws of the organization. Mr. McCombs also states that the PRO's "...‘blowhard honchos' spent the FMC summit boasting of their support for songwriters and musicians while disingenuously pretending that all those performers own their own copyrights." Firstly, with regards to that statement, a little house cleaning is in order ...Mr. McCombs makes the error in interchanging songwriters, musicians and performers in his rant. PROs represent only songwriters and music publishers. Musicians and performers cannot belong to PROs unless they are songwriters and/or publishers. More importantly, if Mr. McCombs had taken a moment to read the copyright law he would have known that the writer IS the owner of all rights until he or she makes the choice as to how those rights are disbursed. Writers can elect to retain all of their rights - which many do - in which case the PROs pay them 100% of all royalties due... Many writers do chose to enter into relationships with music publishers in return for benefits they believe they will receive, but, that option is solely theirs. PROs are agnostic as to how rights are divided - if at all - they pay based upon instructions they receive from the legal owner of the rights PROs are engaged to represent. Finally, it's always disturbing to read articles by people who don't know - or care to find out about - what they are talking about. In this case, Mr. McCombs doesn't seem to care about the damage he might cause unknowing new writers by suggesting that PROs are their enemies, when, in fact, PROs are among the most effective and efficient organizations that represent any of the creative disciplines in the entertainment industry. I suggest that any songwriter who has read Mr. McCombs article and my comments review the web sites offered by the PROs to find out what they really do have to offer. Further, if Mr. McCombs has lead any songwriter to believe that they will be disadvantaged by joining a PRO, I implore them to contact an entertainment industry attorney and pay the few bucks it will cost to have him or her tell them truth. It would have been nice if Mr. McCombs would done one or both of those things before running off at the mouth about a subject he obviously knows nothing about. Dean Kay Writer of That's Life