Normally I'm a "the contract sets the limits" person but in artist's rights, an given the extent to which artists are both young, and exploited, and wind up in legally dubious relationships which then magify out and up, I think the intent should be "what's the right thing here, no matter what the contract says"
And I think unless she received heinous amounts of fuck you money, and sold her rights for their current worth, unless she did that, if this is just normal A&R nickel-and-diming, then they should be told to go away, and she should get to perform her songs.
"you can't perform your songs" is a very sad place to wind up. it does nobody any good.
She very possibly did receive heinous amounts of A&R support but I would also believe a lot of leeching has been going on. The industry is a giant machine to suck revenue out of art and put it into tax efficient structures for other people.
They learned from masters: the movie industry. Who did those masters learn from? The Sheet music industry.
Pop will eat itself.
If young artists cannot sign away their rights to the songs they create they won't get funded in the first place.
> And I think unless she received heinous amounts of fuck you money, and sold her rights for their current worth, unless she did that, if this is just normal A&R nickel-and-diming, then they should be told to go away, and she should get to perform her songs.
This is absurd reasoning. "You have to pay for IP rights. Also, if the artist is successful, you have to pay them again in 10 years depending on how successful that become." If they want that kind of a deal, it's usually possible to negotiate points for money, especially with unknown talent.
There is this idea that artists have some sort of moral right to control the destiny of their creation. This is garbage thinking.
Quite frankly, becoming a pop star is a huge gamble. Most people who get fronted money by labels don't make it. Those that do pay for all the failures. If you want to call that "exploitation", so be it. But I don't have much sympathy for her predicament.
Bullshit. We are perfectly fine accepting all sorts of contact limitations in other areas. How many times have I heard on this site that people wish all states were like California in making non-competes unenforceable. And yet engineers still manage to get hired there.
I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to amend performance contract law to state that artists who actually wrote songs should always be allowed to perform them, even if someone else owns the "rights". Heck, even put in some reasonable royalty payment that the "rights owner" must be paid if the original performer performs her songs, but don't allow an outright ban on performing them.
The "rights owners" would still have full control over ability to use that music in other areas, and by other artists, commercials, political rallies, etc.
Of course they will, because there will still be plenty of money in it. They've made quite a bit of money off of Swift already.
Sounds like Taylor is discovering the "negative side" at this point.
Be that as it may, though, if she signed a contract and made hundreds of millions of dollars with it, she should abide by the terms of the contract. Don't like it? Don's sign. Or at least don't extend when the time comes to renew.
>This is WRONG.
Is that the message? Is it not the case that this is the result of a legally binding contract?
Basically when you sign with a record label you give them certain rights with respect to creative control, music ownership and licensing in exchange for them investing in helping you produce and market your music to a wide audience, network in the industry, tour, etc. In short, they help you make it big and take on early costs and risks and in exchange you make them rich if you do become extremely successful.
Also known as "trying to renegotiate her contract".
It is I guess similar to the case where you might get hired as a programmer for XYZ Corp, and while there you use their resources and facilities to create an Uber or AirBnB app which goes on to make billions for the company. If you leave the company, the IP stays with them and they can continue to make money off it and not give a dime to you.
However, the corollary to this is that in the music industry, the IP is really not worth anything without the artist themselves performing the music, in most cases. I get that in this case, the owners of the IP want to still make royalties and money from the actual performance of the music, but I don't understand why they would restrict the artist (Ms. Swift) from performing or recording her music in the interim?? They would still get some APRA royalties from the performance.
NB: IIRC, Paul McCartney does not own the rights to the Beatles music catalog nowadays. It more recently belonged to Michael Jackson, and now to whoever bought it from his estate. But in this case, there is no 'don't perform' clauses in place, so Paul can still sing those old Beatles hits in public, and the owner of the catalog gets a split of the royalties.
Of course you were surprised - the music industry doesn't like to advertise what a bunch of snakes they are, and media consolidation helps, so that what used to be common knowledge/stereotype, is now obscure.
It's like startups. Someone pays some 20-somethings to work themselves to death on their passion project. Most fail fast, some are notable, and a few are runaway successes.
1/ There’s no need to call out gender — “be a good little girl and shut up”, referring to “these men”, etc. Not during 2019’s entertainment industry harassment crisis. This is an intellectual property rights issue but it feels like Swift is trying to nudge it in another direction, unfairly.
2/ When your net worth is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars it seems calculating and disingenuous to try to have your way in the court of public opinion. Asking your fans to directly contact the other party in the legal dispute feels like straight up bullying.
2) What does her net worth have to do with this? She is an artist that wants to perform the songs that she wrote. Was she allowed to complain if she wasn't rich or what?
Everybody knows social media is a fast way of resolving issues with big companies. And the more famous you are, the better and faster it works.
Disallowing an artist to perform her own music also feels like legal bullying to me, she is just fighting back. Let's see if it works.
I’m not a fan of identity politics, and I’m tired of the bullshit as well, which is precisely why I called it out for being weaponized in what seems like an otherwise perfectly banal bun fight between two groups of corporate intellectual property lawyers.
There is precedent for it.[1] And if you consider the collective wealth of a labor union, calling a strike is a form of a "millionaire" (for a sufficiently large union) trying to have their way in the court of public opinion.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/aug/10/history-prince...
1/ There’s no need to call out gender
If you think that'll weaken her message, you haven't been paying attention to society lately. This will resonate strongly with the people she intends it to resonate with.
Maybe you mean it makes the message less compelling to you personally. I'm not sure Taylor cares about that though...
2/ When your net worth is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars it seems calculating and disingenuous to try to have your way in the court of public opinion.
Again, I don't think you're thinking things through. Taylor's fans are incredibly loyal. The only people who are likely to think of this as bullying are already not her fans.
If anything, this tells me Taylor should consider politics. It seems like she knows how the game is played these days.
As a piece of PR though, you are absolutely right. There’s nothing weak at all in this message.
Attempting to mobilize millions of fans like this is a nuclear option not only because it is a huge expression of power, but also an apt analogy in terms of the morality of whether such power should be used at all. (Said with all due respect to the victims of actual nuclear weapons.)
If that’s the case though, alluding to it as part of an IP rights battle seems an odd way to go about it. One would think that 2019 is the most receptive time in history for figures like Taylor Swift to come forward with explicit allegations of sexism.
Nobody is bullying anybody here.
I just don’t want to find my niece writing hate mail because Taylor Swift asked her to. To that extent, it’s not the bullying or the bullied that I worry about, it’s the normalization of bullying as a behavior.
2. It feels like straight up bullying because that's what this is.
People using social issues to manipulate situations in their favor? Say it isn't so! It's the unintended consequence (intended, to some) that people have been trying to warn the ultra-identity-politics movement about. I had a disagreement with a project collaborator recently, and when I referred to them in the third person, they demanded I use different pronouns for them...different than what they advertise to everyone else publicly. What can you say to that? People are using these social talking points as unassailable offense tactics, because it's cheap and easy power. Nothing new here.
PSA: I just prepend https://outline.com/ to the URL of a FB post to get the actual text (as FB domains are resolved to 0.0.0.0 in my house).
What am I missing here?
The original owners of the music (the label she signed with) seemed to do right by her and she was comfortable with that arrangement, but the new owners of her music have put different demands on her which is severely restricting her from performing her music to her fans.
It is a crazy situation, but happens quite often. Imagine if the owners of the Queen catalog said that their actual music could not be used for the recent hit movie - then it wouldn't have been anywhere near the hit that it was.
That was the problem with the Jimi Hendrix movie a couple of years back. Jimi's sister, who owns the rights to his music now, said they couldn't use his actual songs in the movie, so what you ended up with was Jimi 'sounding' music and it wasn't the same at all...
https://www.bustle.com/p/why-doesnt-taylor-swift-own-the-rig...
So if she were to really put the money where her mouth is, she could probably buy the rights to her old records with her reported $360 million of net worth, or find a more friendly recording label willing to do so.
However, once you sell something to someone else it no longer belongs to you. This includes works of art.
For those not familiar with compulsory licenses, US copyright law provides that for certain kinds of works and uses of those works, instead of obtaining a license from the copyright owner you can pay a fee to the Copyright Office and they can give you the license. The Copyright Office sets the amount of the fee. The money still goes to the copyright owner.
It doesn't matter if the copyright owner doesn't want you to have a license [1]. If you pay the fee, you get the license.
Unfortunately for Swift, I don't think that taking a compulsory license would help her here. I don't think that there is a compulsory license available for broadcast rights or for performance rights, one or both of which would be necessary for performing the songs on a TV broadcast. I think that the only compulsory license available for songs is the right to make and distribute audio recordings.
[1] One big exception. In the case of recordings of songs, compulsory licenses are not available until after there has been a release authorized by the copyright holder. Once the first authorized release is out, others can take compulsory licenses and make and release their own recordings.
and once we swap sides, will she act differently?
