The first royalty payments from iMatch are in, and they got me excited – the total amount is over $10,000 for the first two months.
This is magic money that Apple made exist out of thin air for copyright holders.
Let me explain:
iMatch monetizes the existing behavior of the consumer for copyright holders and artists. Consumers don’t need to do anything new—they just need to listen to their pre-existing music.
View PostAs some of you may already know, there are two bills bouncing around Capitol Hill called PIPA and SOPA that are supposed to stop websites and internet services from illegally giving away other people’s music (this also extends to film, books, software, video games etc., but I am only going to focus on the music side of things).
I adamantly believe that when an artist creates and records a song, the artist, and only the artist, should have the right to do with it what they want. If they want to sell it, they should sell it. If they want to give it away, it’s theirs to give away. No one else has the right to make those decisions for them.
View PostThe world of making physical CDs or vinyl albums and shipping them on pallets to Walmart, is coming to an end.
The world of needing third parties to track how many times a song is played on analog AM/FM radio and analog television is just about over.
The world of having gatekeepers deciding who gets let in, is gone.
It’s over. It changed, it’s a new game. The traditional music industry is on its last breath. Soon it will be completely and utterly dead. It’s not a matter of “if,” it’s a matter of “when.”
View PostWhen you paint a picture of hopelessness for artists, suggest they are failures and attempt to discourage them based on a nonsensical math equation and incomplete data, then you’ve lashed out at the wrong target
View PostGet ready to cut the ribbon; the search engine giant Google has just launched the long-awaited Google Music, a platform enabling musicians to connect with their fans. Google Music allows you to discover and purchase new music, upload your personal collection to the cloud, share purchased tracks with friends on Google+, and access your entire collection from the web or any device. So what does this new digital platform mean for the user? And for the artist?
View PostHere’s the New York Times article headline that ran on November 6, 2011: “Sirius’s Move to Bypass a Royalty Payment Clearinghouse Causes an Uproar”
Umm, not really, it’s causing an uproar for artists who have transferred their copyrights to labels (i.e. artists “signed” to a label), not for the millions of artists that are their own record labels. It all depends on which side of the coin you’re on.
Under the current law, an artist who is also the record label (which the hundred of thousands of TuneCore Artists are) could make less money (and get paid less often) if their Sirius satellite radio payments go to SoundExchange.
View PostOver the course of history, it was decided that people who made their ideas tangible –like songwriters– should make money. So they made up a bunch of really esoteric, hard to understand rules (aka laws) on how it should all work. The foundation for these laws can actually be found in the United States Constitution. The rules built on this concept get updated from time to time, but ultimately the foundation of the six legal rights that a person gets when he or she creates a copyrighted work, by making a song tangible (meaning it’s recorded or written down) are the basis for all the rules, laws and money made in the music industry.
View PostBy Jeff Price
A thank you to Bob Lefsetz for His September 10th, 2011 article as it was the impetus for this one (you can visit the Lefsetz archive here).
In the old music industry, there were only three media outlets that could cause an artist to “break” nationally: MTV, magazines like Rolling Stone, and commercial radio. Today, of these three outlets, only commercial radio is left, and the major record labels, in collusion with the station owners, control it. Simply stated, if an artist is not signed to a major label the probability of getting airplay on a Top 40 or Hot AC station (or any other format that has an impact) is right up there with Congress getting along. It’s just not going to happen.
View PostBy Jeff Price
Lava lamps, Happy Days, mood rings, MASH, and Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview weren’t the only things to come out of the ’70s. In addition, copyright law was revised by the U.S. government granting artists and songwriters “termination rights.” This law states that 35 years after 1978 the recordings and songs “owned” by record labels or publishers would revert back to the artist or songwriter regardless of if the artist or songwriter was recouped, un-recouped, etc. In other words, the government said to the labels and publishers,“ 35 years is long enough. Times up, give them back control over their work.”
For those of you counting, 35 years from 1978 is 2013.
View PostBy Jeff Price
We get hit up by a lot of people and companies asking us to promote “Battle of the Band” contests to TuneCore Artists. The “winners” receives the grand prize of getting signed.
And I have to tell you, 99.9% of time, I pass on the opportunity, I just don’t feel right marketing and promoting a contest to artist that has the “winner” assign or give up rights and/or ownership of their copyrights to another entity. I’m not so sure that’s “winning.”
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