An Invitation to discuss at Un-Convention Manchester, 4th – 6th June 2009
Recently an organisation called Featured Artists Coalition was formed to give a lobbying voice to performing artists wishing to protect and advance their rights in the music industries. We find this a positive, admirable and understandable move for musicians.
We believe that most musicians create primarily for artistic and cultural reasons, and that while the commercial benefits are critically important (and we do understand the imperative for music to create economic reward), this is not the purpose of music. Moreover, music as culture is not represented at any policy level and so important decisions are being made without consideration for the cultural aspect of music itself.
When commerce is the only consideration, we believe the cultural, social, intellectual and artistic life of the citizenry suffers. Innovation suffers and the creative economy is hamstrung as a result.
For instance, the vast majority of all recorded works ever released (estimates place this in excess of 90%) are not currently commercially available in any form. This represents a phenomenal wealth of cultural capital that is locked away and inaccessible simply because it is not considered commercially expedient for the labels to make it available, and there is no incentive or imperative for them to do so.
In addition, scholars and archivists are unable to preserve, develop, access and expand knowledge around works that are bound in restrictive copyrights. As a result, when approached from a purely economic perspective, understanding of popular culture becomes limited and the commercial interests and profit motives of entertainment corporations are held to be more significant than the growth of human knowledge and understanding.
These are critical issues for a healthy, creative and vibrant nation wishing for competitive advantage in the 21st century. While we fundamentally support fair and equitable reward and incentive for creative artists and accountability to them on the part of the institutions of music business, we believe that to consider music solely as a commercial domain misses its most important aspect.
We hope that the following suggestions will promote discussion, debate and further ideas for the consideration of Music As Culture, its central role within what is perceived as the music industries, and its place in social and cultural policy-making:
- Active expansion, promotion and propagation of the public domain;
- The release of commercially inactive or economically inviable works into the public domain under a ʻuse-it-or-lose-itʼ copyright clause;
- Strong fair use and non-commercial use provisions;
- Permission for non-commercial use assumed for all orphan works;
- Strong copyright exceptions for libraries & scholarship;
- Active support for archives & long-term (1000+ year) preservation of culture;
- Reduction of copyright term, but renewable for active commercial works so as to reward creators without lockdown of cultural works in the process;
- Creation of a central, online register of copyright works that is free, open and unambiguous;
- Audit of major record label back catalogue to discover and liberate lost works;
- The establishment of an open framework and distributed archive of public domain and Creative Commons licensed works and a repository for unreleased works that artists wish to contribute;
We wish to hold a discussion meeting for all interested parties at Un-Convention Manchester on 4-6 June, 2009.
I think there are some great points raised here, and this is a really important debate.
I’m not sure if it fits with the particular discussion you are raising, but aside from the policy makers, cultural funding is also a curious animal when it comes to music, and probably illustrates the different perceptions of the cultural value of particular genres.
In the Arts world, ‘Music as Culture’ appears to mean ‘Certain Kinds of Music as Culture’, essentially tarring contemporary music with the ‘everyone is just doing for the money’ brush.
Contemporary Music = The Music Industry = Loads of Money For Everyone, seems to be the logic, and implicitly everyone’s motivation.
Arguably, a disproportion amount of state resources (and huge resources at that), are directed to say Classical Music, because Classical Music = Culture. I don’t believe this is the Governments opinion, but rather more that of the funding bodies holding the purse strings, whose definition of culture is rather narrower than the one we are talking about.
Anyway, that’s that rant over – on this point, yes I think it’s really important that we get back to the fact that music is a cultural / artistic / social / personal / heart pumping / melancholic / euphoric / inspiring human experience first, and a commodity second – so lets start making decisions accordingly.
I remember seeing this while back – – it’s about an hour long mind, but interesting.
As I say, there’s a really important debate to be had here.
Cheers
Jeff
This will come as no surprise to the Interactive Cultures team, but I recently came across an article relating to David Bowie’s foresight in regards to the increasing irrelevance of copyright. In a 2002 Bowie interview with The New York Times, he foresaw the arrival of the likes of Spotify with his observations that “music itself is going to become like running water or electricity”.
It notes how it wasn’t all that long ago when sheet music was the most important ‘format’ when it came to selling music.
Anyway, I’ll leave you with the relevant bit from the article. It’s interesting to note just how accurate his predictions were…
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His deal with Sony is a short-term one while he gets his label started and watches the Internet’s effect on careers. “I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”
On the issue of ‘use it or lose it’ – having done both A&R and marketing for a major label catalogue division I found that the objections to releasing deep catalogue were, in the main, purely commercial and not creative.
Understandably the company was loathe to spend large amounts of money to source, master and market music of limited commercial appeal. They are after all a business not a charity.
However by judging on solely commercial appeal this ensures that huge swathes of music will never see the light of day or, for instance, be released to the artists for self distribution.
We continually received requests from artists or their estates for their masters to be returned to them so they could release the music – having identified a demand – or for the rights owner to release the music to satisfy the demand. These requests were not always met either from a cost, retention or contractual reason – the contracts determining usages and terms benefit the rights owner and not the artist – for instance the artist may have to pay for a master of their recordings, would only get physical rights (and may have to provide a master to the label so the label could release digitally – this would be at a cost to the artist) and often have to pay additional royalties above and beyond their contracted royalty rate.
Third party requests for catalogue from specialist labels such as jazz or soul labels also face similar challenges with the added cost of paying an advance against sales while, like the artist, having to recoup against declining physical sales within a limited period of time.
In my personal experience sound recordings are literally decaying in the archives of labels due to never being transferred from tape. While many can be, and are, saved many are not. It is this passive destruction, this neglect of artists work and heritage, which is a cause for concern.
The true level of archival decay is hard to identify as labels, understandably, do not wish to publicise their own neglect. As we now have a sense of the destruction of original TV film and live drama recordings at institutions such as the BBC it would not be surprising to see the same levels – or higher – at labels especially bearing in mind the various mergers, takeovers and shuttering of labels over the past decades.
There are archives of sound recordings that are poorly catalogued, in a poor state of repair or completely degraded, that will never be restored, released or licensed by the rights owner due to commercial imperatives and / or objections and, as a result, disenfranchise the original recording artists, composers and potential consumers of these recordings.
Representations traditionally made by the rights owners – specifically to the cost of discovering, restoration, mastering etc do have some merit especially as the cost / value equation defines a large element of the criteria for catalogue releases – but the growth of the fan or crowd sourced vinyl ‘rip’ has met many of these arguments. These ‘rips’ are digital transfers (to audiophile quality) from vinyl recordings that make deleted sound recordings (and artwork) available to interested collectors. There is no commercial imperative behind this. These are high quality mastered digital versions of original recordings distributed free of charge to fans via specialist online blogs. Despite the rights owners showing no desire or commitment to releasing ‘official’ recordings of this music themselves they still seek to limit these releases by the use of copyright law and accusations of piracy.
One possible solution to the unfair retention of rights and music by labels is as follows:
I propose that following a request for commercial release from an artist, composer or musician (of repertoire that has not been released by the rights owner or that is not readily available) that a rights owner must agree to a form of commercial release of the artist’s catalogue within six months or less of the written request. If the label cannot meet this request they should, at their cost, release the masters to the artist for them to exploit with a reverse contract.
By ‘reverse contract’ I suggest the record company would receive the same royalty as originally offered to the artist and the artist could recoup the same costs as the record label would choose to do including packaging deductions, mastering costs etc incurred by their releasing the material.
Commercially the majority of costs associated with catalogue repertoire have been written off or long ago recouped by the rights owner so the issue of the original advance should no longer be relevant.
By effectively reversing the rights and terms to the recording artist the rights owners stand to commercially benefit from the commercial endeavours of the artist – or their representatives – by doing little more than providing access to their archives and adjusting a contractual template – however if the master recordings are lost or decayed then compensation should then be paid to the artists.
Artists and their nominated representatives or estates should also be assigned digital rights as a matter of course.
If the labels are concerned about the cost of issuing source masters then a commercial partnership with blogs and collectors – whereby they effectively outsource restoration and re-mastering – would be a cost efficient method of sourcing high quality digital masters via vinyl rips as outlined above.
I believe that with rights come responsibilities. As such a levy should be visited upon rights owners to develop a digital archive of recorded music and artwork and that the rights owners be forced to deliver a standard of care for their archives that safeguards the heritage and commercial rights of both artists and their recordings.