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question about the music "business"


Gil Bang

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These days you don't...

 

But you get paid on a percentage of plays and sales. A hit single gets a lot more money than a deep cut obviously. With streaming, it's hard to make much money on album sales. Having a radio hit is pretty much the only way to make anything significant.

 

To put it in perspective, Max Collins of eve6 recently disclosed that make significantly more money from their 450 Patreon subscribers, at 5 dollars a month, than the 1.5 million streams they booked.

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There are two copyrights at play here

1) Copyright to the Song. This is defined as something like the "melody and lyrics" and is referred to as the "publishing". This is what you own in this scenario

2) Copyright to the Sound Recording. This is the specific recording that is released by the artist/record label, typically/traditionally this would be owned by the record label.

As a publisher, you get money/royalties/whatever from

1) Mechanical Royalties - grants the right to put your song into an album. As the songwriter, you have the right to the first commercial release of the song (nobody can release a song you have not previously made commercially available unless you grant them that right)  but past that, you cannot say no and the rate is set by statute. Currently it is 9.1 Cents. You get 9.1 cents per song per album that is sold (I think... sold not manufactured). Honestly here I don't know exactly how things have changed over the past decade or so with streaming and digital sales, but this gets you closer to understanding. I think streaming just pays performance royalties, I assume digital sales count as mechanicals. If you are a recording artist and want to cover a song on an album, you work with the Harry Fox Agency to secure the Mechanical Licenses.

2) Sync Royalties - this lets someone use a song in another work. Think "one time payment to include in a film or commercial or video game or whatever". This is for the song, as the filmmaker or whatever you would need to get a Master Recording License as well to use the sound recording. You would reach out directly to the publishing company (the company that takes half your publishing rights to manage the compositions, or you have your own "publishing company" that is basically you) to secure the rights here

3) Performance Royalties - these are the royalties that you get from when your song is performed (by a band in a concert, on the radio, when it is broadcast on television in the movie/TV show/commercial/etc). There are some cutouts here - movie theaters don't have to pay, you can play the radio in your store and you don't have to pay but if you play a record over the sound system you're theoretically supposed to pay, I feel like I'm forgetting some other big cutout but definitely movie theaters is one of them. This is obviously a very difficult one to track - in the early 20th century Irving Berlin and a bunch of Tin Pan Alley types started the American Association of Publishers, Authors, and Composers to secure payment for these rights, and soon the broadcast industry formed Broadcast Music Inc to do the same thing. ~90% of publishers (songwriters, etc) belong to either BMI or ASCAP, the third one is called SESAC (.... Southern Europe Stupid Ass Coalition or something). As a music venue owner or radio station or TV station or whatever, you purchase a "blanket license" from both ASCAP and BMI which grants you the right to perform whatever the fuck you want. BMI and ASCAP's job is to track what all is being played and disburse the money to their members. Spotify don't pay SHIT.

 

I think that's basically it.

One thing - you can't say "no" to someone "covering" your song on an album, but you can say no to someone sampling your song on an album. If someone wants to record a version of your song, that is allowed, but you have to grant permission for them to take your song and chop it up and incorporate it into a derivative work. You've never heard Springsteen pop up (or... Petty?) in any hip hop not (only) because people don't want to sample him but because he won't let you. Meanwhile, Billy Squier made eleventy billion dollars off of "The Big Beat" because it has been sampled in every single hip hop song and he gets royalties.

Edited by Celery Man
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The "answer", assuming there are actual sales and broadcast and not just streams, is to copyright the song and sign up with a performing rights organization (BMI, ASCAP, SESAC).  That will make it easier to collect royalties.  Technically, your song is copyrighted when you put it down in "fixed" form (lyric sheet, recording, etc.) but just do the basic work and let the performing rights org collect your meager royalties.

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28 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

As a music venue owner or radio station or TV station or whatever, you purchase a "blanket license" from both ASCAP and BMI which grants you the right to perform whatever the fuck you want.

I understand basically any bar has to pay this as well, not just music venue type places. Depending on locality, enforcement can be militant to nonexistent.

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17 minutes ago, G650 said:

I understand basically any bar has to pay this as well, not just music venue type places. Depending on locality, enforcement can be militant to nonexistent.

Maybe.  I remember Debbie at Hole In The Wall getting pissed at us for covering a Cult song.  Seems like she thought we should have cleared it with her first.

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9 minutes ago, G650 said:

I understand basically any bar has to pay this as well, not just music venue type places. Depending on locality, enforcement can be militant to nonexistent.

yeah - bars, coffee shops, wedding venues, events centers, bookstores, really a much broader range of businesses that are open to the public than you might imagine. Obviously Stubb's pays more for a license than some little coffee shop somewhere, I don't know exactly how BMI and ASCAP go about pricing but extracting money, counting/estimating plays, and sending checks is what they do. I do know that at least to some extent they use tv/radio (where they have good data) as a proxy for live music (where they have shitty to nonexistent data) but I also believe they do special disbursements to try and correct the obvious shortcomings of that approach. It's messy.

You hear stories every now and then from someone owning a coffee shop or little venue or whatever being caught by surprise at the existence of PROs (performance rights organizations) and feeling very shaken down when they are told they need to buy a license. I think the most egregious sounding one had to do with a scouting campsite. But... everybody pays for this, and of all the revenue streams that are out there performance royalties are the ones that go most directly to the creative people who make the music you love. If you're a musician out there performing live and you ever encounter a venue owner who starts going on about how you can only play originals you are about to have a bad time.

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2 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Maybe.  I remember Debbie at Hole In The Wall getting pissed at us for covering a Cult song.  Seems like she thought we should have cleared it with her first.

lol that sounds very hole in the wall-ish. they may have been back then but there's no fucking way they are still flying under the radar

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9 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

I don't know exactly how BMI and ASCAP go about pricing but extracting money, counting/estimating plays, and sending checks is what they do.

I've never met one personally but apparently they do send people out to survey whats being played. I think they have certain demographic profiles they use as well, ie. the country bar has a different mix than the dance club obvs.

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2 hours ago, Celery Man said:

There are two copyrights at play here

1) Copyright to the Song. This is defined as something like the "melody and lyrics" and is referred to as the "publishing". This is what you own in this scenario

2) Copyright to the Sound Recording. This is the specific recording that is released by the artist/record label, typically/traditionally this would be owned by the record label.

As a publisher, you get money/royalties/whatever from

1) Mechanical Royalties - grants the right to put your song into an album. As the songwriter, you have the right to the first commercial release of the song (nobody can release a song you have not previously made commercially available unless you grant them that right)  but past that, you cannot say no and the rate is set by statute. Currently it is 9.1 Cents. You get 9.1 cents per song per album that is sold (I think... sold not manufactured). Honestly here I don't know exactly how things have changed over the past decade or so with streaming and digital sales, but this gets you closer to understanding. I think streaming just pays performance royalties, I assume digital sales count as mechanicals. If you are a recording artist and want to cover a song on an album, you work with the Harry Fox Agency to secure the Mechanical Licenses.

2) Sync Royalties - this lets someone use a song in another work. Think "one time payment to include in a film or commercial or video game or whatever". This is for the song, as the filmmaker or whatever you would need to get a Master Recording License as well to use the sound recording. You would reach out directly to the publishing company (the company that takes half your publishing rights to manage the compositions, or you have your own "publishing company" that is basically you) to secure the rights here

3) Performance Royalties - these are the royalties that you get from when your song is performed (by a band in a concert, on the radio, when it is broadcast on television in the movie/TV show/commercial/etc). There are some cutouts here - movie theaters don't have to pay, you can play the radio in your store and you don't have to pay but if you play a record over the sound system you're theoretically supposed to pay, I feel like I'm forgetting some other big cutout but definitely movie theaters is one of them. This is obviously a very difficult one to track - in the early 20th century Irving Berlin and a bunch of Tin Pan Alley types started the American Association of Publishers, Authors, and Composers to secure payment for these rights, and soon the broadcast industry formed Broadcast Music Inc to do the same thing. ~90% of publishers (songwriters, etc) belong to either BMI or ASCAP, the third one is called SESAC (.... Southern Europe Stupid Ass Coalition or something). As a music venue owner or radio station or TV station or whatever, you purchase a "blanket license" from both ASCAP and BMI which grants you the right to perform whatever the fuck you want. BMI and ASCAP's job is to track what all is being played and disburse the money to their members. Spotify don't pay SHIT.

 

I think that's basically it.

One thing - you can't say "no" to someone "covering" your song on an album, but you can say no to someone sampling your song on an album. If someone wants to record a version of your song, that is allowed, but you have to grant permission for them to take your song and chop it up and incorporate it into a derivative work. You've never heard Springsteen pop up (or... Petty?) in any hip hop not (only) because people don't want to sample him but because he won't let you. Meanwhile, Billy Squier made eleventy billion dollars off of "The Big Beat" because it has been sampled in every single hip hop song and he gets royalties.

Reminds me of this: Diddy pays Sting $5,000 a day for sampling his biggest song

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/06/diddy-pays-sting-5000-a-day-for-sampling-his-biggest-hit-song.html

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12 minutes ago, BeardIP said:

Reminds me of this: Diddy pays Sting $5,000 a day for sampling his biggest song

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/06/diddy-pays-sting-5000-a-day-for-sampling-his-biggest-hit-song.html

Where is Diddy getting that kind of revenue on "I'll Be Missing You"?  Not terrestrial radio.  Streaming?  Really?  Is it hooked to some sort of video game that gets continuous exposure?

It implies that the song is doing something like $50M annual, year after year. Really?  Good work if you can get it, I suppose.

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9 minutes ago, PantsTent said:

Nice try, Gil, but @Chooky and @Bozo_Casanova already have the rights to the "Freedom Boner Liberty Pants Eagle Flag Patriot Boots" song.

 

I think so too, but I got a C&D from @Brisketexan claiming it's a derivative work because I sampled "Hunan Lion" from @Pescado_Rojo's post about Chinese Restaurant names.

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41 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I think so too, but I got a C&D from @Brisketexan claiming it's a derivative work because I sampled "Hunan Lion" from @Pescado_Rojo's post about Chinese Restaurant names.

That's right, and you gotta pay for sampling.  A lesson Vanilla Ice learned the hard way -- don't make yourself the second Dallas-area-native sample-thief I have to bitchslap.  Robbie Van Winkle's face still bears the sting from our last encounter.

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