Re: OT: composers and musicians being paid their royalties, was Fripp and Eno

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On 17 jul 2007, at 04.48, paul wrote:
> Don't believe it, the record companies never do anything for the  
> artist in the long run.....

Oh, they might do if it's estimated commercially lucrative. It's just  
like any other business. A good deal should be a win-win situation  
contract. Everything else is a bad deal for one of the parts.

> Now I had a lawyer look it over and he told me that I actually had  
> one of the better contracts he had ever seen because if the  
> recording flopped totally; I at least didn't owe the record label  
> whatever money they had invested.

I agree with Paul that record labels tend to play more foul compared  
to publishers or PRO's. Some years ago a record label I had been  
signed to earlier on went bankrupt and before an investment company  
was allowed to buy what was left an independent auditor was set to go  
through the book keeping. It turned out the record label had withhold  
USD 2700 that was actually mine. Since a lot of the money was gone  
with the bankruptcy I only received about half the sum. Oh well,  
better than nothing. But the fact stays written on the wall: they  
simply ripped me off. And if they had not went bankrupt they would  
have perfectly gotten away with it.


On 16 jul 2007, at 10.42, Stefan Tiedje wrote:
> My experience with the RIAA/Gema family of corporations is, that  
> they claim they protect the artists, but they are only interested  
> to protect the publishers.

Of course, that's the nature of their business! Here's from GEMAS web  
site:

"We protect and promote the authors of music, represent the interests  
of composers, lyricists and their publishers worldwide and actively  
follow the music markets."

The only situation GEMA would care about an artist would be if that  
artist is also the composer of the music he performs or licenses for  
mass manufactured copies to be distributed.

> I'd love to find a authors rights corpoartion which would allow me  
> to puplish my work under a creative commons license and still let  
> them effectively take care about royalties for commercial use...

That would be a normal publishing company or just a managing company,  
I'd guess. I know the publishing companies that have offices around  
here and some do really aggressive marketing to pitch the music of  
their composers to commercial users. My guess is that an existing  
Creative Commons public license would be no problem for that.

Speaking PRO's, it seems to me the Scandinavian based STIM does a  
pretty good job. But it all depends on you, as the author of your  
work, to properly register your work with the PRO. There are  
different kind of legal rights to music, the author's rights are the  
biggest part. Then there are so called neighboring rights as well,  
i.e. the rights of musicians that played on a recording without  
actually being the composer of the music. In Sweden there is a  
special "PRO" for those neighboringrights called SAMI (Swedish  
Artist's and Musician's Interest organization). I recently, totally  
unexpectedly,  received a bit over a thousand dollars that way for  
"air plays abroad". No specification on which country or which  
recordings, so there's no way to know if the figure is correct or  
not. Maybe some track, with me as studio musician, became a radio hit  
somewhere in the world? It's like a lottery, I think.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se (Swedish)
www.looproom.com (international)