8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

The Wild West Days Of The Web Are Over

· Leave a Comment

The Verge:

(Josh Greenberg) had violated the tenets of intellectual property law, of course, but there was precedent for that. Nullsoft’s Justin Frankel had coded Winamp without licensing the underlying mp3 technology; YouTube’s Steve Chen and Chad Hurley had looked the other way as users had uploaded thousands of infringing videos; Napster’s Shawn Fanning had acted as if the entire concept of copyright was obsolete. Greenberg resembled them. He was a scion of middle-class America; he’d attended a state school; he was young, and male, and comfortable with the internet’s culture of appropriation. The template was to move fast and to break things, and to let the lawyers figure out the repercussions once you’d earned your millions.



If Grooveshark had debuted in 2003, or maybe even 2005, he might have gotten away with it. Like a claim-jumper in the 19th century, Grooveshark could perhaps have emerged from the era of digital lawlessness with enough leverage to force the music companies to the negotiating table, and borrowed enough expertise from the venture capitalists to become a functional business. With a little luck, the company might have outmaneuvered Spotify, and Greenberg would have been a business icon.


I had a link to this month-old article hidden in one of my recent posts, but I think it deserves its own place as it’s well worth a read. The author shapes his piece as more of a commentary on changes in the Internet / entrepreneur industry – he believes the days of the budding teenage tech billionaire have passsed – but, of course, it’s all intertwined with developments in the music industry. The required move over the past decade from ‘digital lawlessness’ to legitimacy enlightens a bit about SoundCloud’s recent troubles, as well as how smart Spotify has been from the outset. The article also reminds me how it’s a deep shame that we won’t get to see what Josh Greenberg will come up with next as there was some seriously brilliant idea-making behind Grooveshark.

Musicians Sue Universal, Sony And Warner Over Streaming Payments

· Leave a Comment

Music Business Worldwide:

The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) claims that the majors signed a collective bargaining agreement in 1994, and further amendments over the next decade, in which it committed to paying AFM members 0.5% of all receipts from digital statutory and non-statutory music licenses – including audio streams, ‘non-permanent downloads’ and ringback tones – both in North America and abroad.



The AFM’s Pension Fund has now filed a lawsuit in New York claiming its independent auditors recently discovered that the majors have failed to make promised contributions in three areas: (i) from streaming receipts outside the US; (ii) from non-permanent downloads outside the US; and (iii) from sales of ringback tones in the US and abroad.



“The record companies should stop playing games about their streaming revenue and pay musicians and their pension fund every dime that is owed,” said Ray Hair, AFM International President. “Fairness and transparency are severely lacking in this business. We are changing that.”


We’ll probably see a lot more of this over the next several years as we continue to navigate our covered wagons through the wild west of the streaming economy. It’s common knowledge — almost to the point of being grudgingly accepted — that the majors (and many independents) practice fuzzy mathematics when it comes to bookkeeping. But this will get tougher to obscure as the exact science of calculating ones and zeroes connecting to a user’s device replaces hand-counting the number of CD units leaving on a truck from the distributor’s warehouse. Keeping the gatekeepers honest (Spotify, Pandora, etc) will be the key. They aren’t angels, but they don’t have as much of an incentive for smoke-and-mirrors as a record label does.

The Twisted History Of The Happy Birthday Song And The Copyright Shenanigans That Keep It Profitable

· Leave a Comment

Here’s more on “Happy Birthday”, via Boing Boing:

This suit was nearing its conclusion when a thrilling last-minute piece of evidence emerged from Warner/Chappell: an excerpt of a 1927 title called The Everyday Song Book produced by the piano-making firm, The Cable Company. The song, numbered 16, is called “Good Morning and Birthday Song” with the main lyrics under the score, and “optional” words below for “Happy Birthday.” The ostensible copyright notice was blurred in the version supplied by the music company.



Nelson’s lawyer noted it was not the first edition, and were able to get a library to dig up the 1922 version. The same version appears there without a legally required statement of copyright.



This would seem to be the end of the line for “Happy Birthday.” The (plaintiff) should prevail; fees collected starting in 2009, within the statute of limitations at the time the suit was filed, should be refunded; and a clear future would be established for public-domain use. But copyright is a crooked path.



It would be nice to close the book on “Happy Birthday,” but it doesn’t close the book on copyright absurdity. An abundance of material from 1923 is poised to enter the public domain in 2019 unless a further taking of the public interest occurs, as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act did in 1998, adding an unnecessary 20 years to the existing 50 years’ protection past an authors’ death.


I’ve been following this convoluted case for a while, and the article on Boing Boing quoted above is perhaps the best summation of the whole thing that I’ve seen. It also includes background on the sisters who wrote “Happy Birthday” … their story, which I didn’t really know, is fascinating.

Music Library Warning Bells

· Leave a Comment

The DIY Musician on the controversial practice of retitling:

When you sign a non-exclusive agreement, you may have multiple parties wanting to collect public performance royalties on their specific placements only. The way to achieve this is by registering the song with the performing rights organization under a new title.

(This) usually means that the licensing company collects royalties for those placements in perpetuity (forever). If these royalties are theirs to collect forever, this could impact the value of your publishing catalog in the future, if you enter into a traditional publishing or co-publishing deal. It also causes confusion for music supervisors, studios, and the performing rights organizations when multiple parties are claiming ownership over the same work, which can often lead to content providers not receiving royalties they’re owed.


Before signing any catalog to a music library always specifically ask if they retitle. A lot of libraries have sneaky ways to insert retitling rights into their agreements that you may miss if you’re not used to looking for these sorts of provisions. If you think a ‘non-exclusive’ agreement means the library isn’t retitling then know that you’re probably wrong.

Retitling is messy business. It may be on its way out of favor thanks to audio identification software getting better and starting to be used by PROs for royalty tracking. If you have a lot of retitled songs in your repetoire then the emergence of audio royalty tracking could make your life hell … the retitled ‘versions’ of your songs could be the ones getting identified, which means the library owning that title will be getting the royalties whether they are responsible for the license or not.

A friend had his tracks retitled by a library that ended up submitting the new titles to a bunch of third parties (something else he overlooked as allowed in the agreement). Somehow these ended up at Shazam. My friend had a semi-popular song that this library retitled, and any time someone would ‘Shazam’ it, the re-title came up rather than the actual title that could be found in stores. He was able to contact Shazam and get this fixed but what a nightmare.

So, yeah … avoid any deals that involve retitling.

The DIY Musician article has a lot of other useful advice for things to look out for when signing catalog to music libraries. I’d also pay close attnetion to #5, “Limit the number of non-exclusive licensing partners you work with.”