Media Music Blog

Running a royalty free music business, I have become somewhat of an authority on the subject of music licensing. Although, having said that, this post is not directly about music licensing, it is an observation on the illegal / inconsiderate use of copyrighted material on the web and how you, as an independent composer / producer, band or artist need to protect your assets and your ability to sell your music.

In brief, I strongly believe that you should use an audio watermark on any of your music that you publish to the web. If you don’t, it could well be used without your consent or knowledge, and you could be losing out on valuable licensing fees, which I am sure would contribute to your continued creativity.

There are numerous ways that people can steal your music on the web and once they have it, they are very likely to spread it on peer-to-peer or social network sites as free to use music. These people may not even understand that you spent many hours composing and producing this music and that you earn an income from it. Other people may understand but have no respect for it. I have experienced this first hand too many times!

An un-watermarked track is easy bait to a thief so protect yourself against it. Not only are there a number ways of recording music from a web browser, there are many scraper sites out there that find mp3s on other people’s websites and use it on their own.

To negate the possibility of this, you can take the very simple measure of getting a voice-over to record a professional sound file as a watermark that you can mix into your music track.

All you need is a couple of lines… something like “This audio is copyright… for more information please contact www.MyWebsite.com”. You can include your own name, band name, company name, telephone number, whatever you like really.

Once you have this sound file, simply use your audio editing software to create a protection track. This is just a silent track with your voiceover sound file repeated every 10 seconds or so. You can then mix it into your music track(s) that you are planning to publish to the web and create a watermarked version. People can now download and share this as much as they like, it will be clear that the track is copyright and the cherished property of a talented artist / producer.

If they really want to use your music without the watermark, they won’t mind contacting you and paying an appropriate fee. And if they use it with the watermark, just see it as free advertising.

You may be thinking that you can’t afford a voice-over and editing software. Well, there is an open source editing software that is free, called Audacity, for mixing your protection track and music and as for a voiceover, my colleague, Anthony Richardson, a talented UK voice-over, can record you a simple two-line sound file for just £12GBP+vat when you mention this blog post or my name, Lee Pritchard.

“A very small price to pay for peace of mind.”

Anthony’s site is www.overvoice.co.uk

Get Audacity Here >

Click here to see a previous post about Audacity

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Just the other day I was having an interesting chat with somebody about protecting your Copyright in your own music. I was really surprised to hear that they had been told by a copyright advisor (sent free by their local authority) to do something that I thought would have been obsolete advice years ago. They advised to post a copy of their own music on CD via recorded delivery to themselves and then keep it safe without opening it.

I was aware of this practice, however, I thought there would be new ways of proving ownership of copyright with digital and online technologies. For those who don’t know, I will just explain the point of the posting practice.

The idea is to post a sealed copy of your work to yourself to prove that you own the copyright. This is proved by date of the postal mark and you keep it un-opened unless you need to prove, in court, that you created the content first. Obviously, any fraudulent user will not have proof of ownership from an earlier date than you.

I remember doing this many years ago and unfortunately when the envelope arrived the date was actually ineligible. Fortunately, I had the foresight to include a page from a daily newspaper in the package.

Anyway back to my point, I did not think this advice was still be going around and surely it makes more sense nowadays is to e-mail it to yourself using a free e-mail account. When something is sent using an online e-mail account it is automatically stamped with the date and time that it was e-mailed. I would of thought that this would be sufficient evidence and just as valid as using the Postal Service. To be honest I think it would be easier to forge the date on an envelope than it would be to forge the date in an e-mail account hosted by Yahoo or Hotmail. I guess the only thing you would have to watch is that the account doesn’t go dormant as the free ones do when you don’t use them for a period of time.

Another thought of mine is to use these file transfer sites that allow you permanent storage of files. You could basically upload your content and the upload process would time and date stamp it.

If I was trying to protect my own Copyright in this day and age I would probably put my music in as zip file along with a scanned image from the front page of a daily newspaper including the date, the headline and lead story.

Whichever way is best to do it it’s still boils down to the same conclusion. If somebody tries to steal your Copyrighted music you need to take legal action and go to court if needed. This should be done as a matter of principle or if the fraudulent use is making money from the material to claim some of the revenue. In any case your evidence will be the fact that you can illustrate ownership at a time before the fraudulent user can.

Anyway, at this point I should make it absolutely clear that this is just my considered opinion and I am not a music lawyer or copyright attorney.

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Today, I had a call from a lady who owns a beauty salon. She had just received a letter from a performance royalty collecting society stating that she had to make annual payments to them in order to play music in her business venue. Many people do not even realise they need a license to play music in their public venue and are shocked when they get such letters.

This is not the first time I have received such a call and imagine it won’t be the last!

Although the lady did not agree with having to pay the license for playing music, she, as many do, paid it rather than face the aggravation and possible consequences.

A question that comes up often in this conversation is, who gets the license money that I am paying?

Well, the official answer is, the artist / composer who’s music you are playing - if only this was true. The fact is, the logistics involved in knowing who is being played when and where is so vast and random that the majority of the money collected goes to the mainstream artists and major record labels. Good for them, but not good for the independent artist or composer who ends up as a statistical minority and gets nothing or close to it (if they are lucky).

An independent artist only gets a worthwhile performance royalty payment when their music is broadcast on a major TV or Radio station. Big stations have to produce detailed data in the form of playlists / cue sheets from which accurate royalty payments can be awarded. Smaller stations’ playlists are randomly checked to collate statistical based payments. As an independent composer, the odds of receiving any money are stacked against you unless you get your music played on a heavily monitored broadcast.

The conversation I had today about this took my mind back to a case in Spain where a bar owner played music that he acquired online under the Creative Commons license. He won a case against the Spanish performance royalty collecting society (SGAE). (see links at the end for more info on this)

With SGAE, a composer assigns their performance royalty to the collecting society and can no longer give consent for their music to be played in public or broadcast. This permission can only be licensed through SGAE from this point forward. The SGAE composer can’t even put their own music on their own website, or play it in their own business venue without paying a licence to SGAE - Bizarre but true!

Globally, there are a number of PRO’s (Performance Rights Organisations) who collect license fees on behalf of composers / artists, some that require the composer to assign their performance rights exclusively to them, meaning that only the PRO can allow use of that music. I don’t claim to be a legal expert on all PRO’s T&C’s, but I do know that some performance royalty collectors allow you to enter into a non-exclusive agreement with them which gives you added flexibility. I believe ASCAP and BMI are examples of ones that operate non-exclusively.

At this point in Internet history, I personally don’t think it is a great idea for a composer/artist to assign exclusive rights to a performance royalty collecting society. My opinion is that you should be able to let your PRO collect for you, and you should be able to collect your own royalties directly if you wish. This can only work if you sign non-exclusively. Seasoned composers may shout me down and say that they earn a good royalty cheque from their PRO. Fair enough, it works well for many, however, there are other new ways of distributing and creating an income from music. I believe the option should be a choice, but this will only be possible if ALL PRO’s begin to offer non-exclusive agreements. This would allow composers to make their own decision whether to collect license money themselves, leave the PRO to do it all or do a combination of both.

It would also let composers decide whether to allow Creative Commons licensing of their music and would also let them play it on websites and in public venues of their choice without complications. I know many composers that would favour this and would use an opt in / opt out system to allow PRO’s to collect for broadcast on TV, Radio etc, whilst dealing with the rest directly or through the numerous online distributors.

Many PRO fans may say that things like creative commons are allowing music to be devalued to the point of distorting the market. I say leave the choice with the composer and make PRO assignment non-exclusive accross the board. The majors won’t loose out, but the independents could leverage the new order of digital distribution whilst retaining potentially lucrative broadcast royalties collected by established entities.

Further reading:

The Spanish case http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7154

Creative Commons website http://creativecommons.org/

Creative Commons FAQ regarding collecting societies click here

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The following piece http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ got me thinking about DRM and why it is there in the first place…

I must stress, this is my personal view…

Yes, DRM is there to protect music rights but I personally feel that the whole rights and royalty collecting models are a bit screwed up.

I think DRM is just an attempt by a conventional industry to retain revenue models that have historically served them well. As the statistics by Steve Jobs reveal, 90% of music has no DRM.

For me this is indicative of a much more serious issue, the one of trying to make old royalty collecting policies fit new and emerging technologies. A patch work effect of new licenses and restrictions… having to get an additional license from X for using music in A but not in B is just making the whole situation immensely complicated and very restrictive for the man in the street and the small business.

The rights and royalty situations can now be so complicated that many companies creating and using digital media barely, if at all, understand the rights they have licensed or the rights they may be inadvertently infringing.

I don’t claim to know the answer to the whole problem but I do feel that there needs to be a massive reform of the collecting models surrounding music and music use. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that this will come from the “big four” or the numerous collecting societies that underpin their operations. I feel is will be the increasing numbers of independents and new thinkers. The policies of movements like Creative Commons and the numerous Royalty Free Music models are a refreshing move in the right direction.

I won’t mention any names, but when setting up my company I spoke to a collecting society and discovered that their adviser did not even know the answer to some of the questions I was asking…

If the people creating these policies don’t even understand it what hope is there?

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With the growth of online communities like MySpace and the virtual world of Second Life, which has over 1million members and its own economy, it seems that the more sophisticated the online world gets the more complicated the music royalty / copyright situation becomes.

Technology is creating more opportunities for music use and the corporate giants are reacting by suing people and are attempting to apply historical royalty collecting models to technologies that they have little understanding of.

There now seems to be a global epidemic of copyright infringement and we have a generation that think music is free. I personally don’t think the knee jerk reaction of the industry helps; in fact, it further alienates music fans.

It seems that many independent rights owners, composers and artists that use the web are more flexible about when and how their works can be used. I believe movements like Creative Commons may be part of the way forward as this enables the creator to have more control over which rights they reserve, effectively meaning that they can offer limited free usage whilst reserving the right to generate a revenue from their works.

In my opinion, people should be taught the value of music but feel that the heavy handed approach of the mainstream industry is alienating the generation of people that could well be useful in finding a solution. Why did Universal not try and work with MySpace and MySpace users to create a revolutionary new music platform within MySpace?

Furthermore, the myriad of royalty areas and restrictions around music use make it far too complicated for most people to want to understand.

Now that people can play music in Second Life, I do wonder what stance the mainstream industry will take on this. Effectively, you have people playing their own music collection in their virtual houses and bars. There is an obvious performance royalty issue here; people have music playing that other members of the public can hear. What will the industry do? Will they sue every one in Second Life?

You could be playing music privately in your own virtual garden or on the virtual beach and other people could teleport or walk in and be able to hear your music. Technically, you are then hosting a performance.

Is it time yet to rethink copyright and royalty policies on music use?

I am watching this one with interest indeed

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