(not a tay tay fan. not actually listening to much music these days, I can't quite get Bach and Beefheart out of my head)
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.
> 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"
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.
> If young artists cannot sign away their rights to the songs they create they won't get funded in the first place.
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.
There are a limited number of engineers and the companies who need them actually have to fill those roles in a reasonable amount of time to be able to get things done and stay competitive. This puts pressure on the companies to make the contracts more equal.
There are an (effectively) infinite number of young musicians dying for the chance to “make it big”, and the music companies don’t have the same kind of pressure to constantly have to keep filling seats to get work done. They can take their time and pick and choose however they want. This allows them to write the contracts more in their favor.
They are getting doxxed already. Howard Stern knew how to use his fan base to deal with Mr. Pig Vomit. This is a similar story but for the social media age. Exerting this kind of pressure on execs works, if you know what you are doing.
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.” -- Hunter S Thompson
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.
Evidently, starting next year, Swift will have the legal right to do something harmful to the owners of Big Machine Records- rerecord her old songs. The owners of that company currently have the legal right to prevent her from playing her old songs. There are many artists who I think have been exploited by the executives of their industry, but Taylor Swift isn't one of them. I expect that she was generously compensated for giving up ownership of those songs. If she wants to change the terms of that deal, the other parties have offered to negotiate.
TAYLOR SWIFT·THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2019·READING TIME: 3 MINUTES
Guys - It’s been announced recently that the American Music Awards will be honoring me with the Artist of the Decade Award at this year’s ceremony. I’ve been planning to perform a medley of my hits throughout the decade on the show. Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun have now said that I’m not allowed to perform my old songs on television because they claim that would be re-recording my music before I’m allowed to next year. Additionally - and this isn’t the way I had planned on telling you this news - Netflix has created a documentary about my life for the past few years. Scott and Scooter have declined the use of my older music or performance footage for this project, even though there is no mention of either of them or Big Machine Records anywhere in the film.
Scott Borchetta told my team that they’ll allow me to use my music only if I do these things: If I agree to not re-record copycat versions of my songs next year (which is something I’m both legally allowed to do and looking forward to) and also told my team that I need to stop talking about him and Scooter Braun.
I feel very strongly that sharing what is happening to me could change the awareness level for other artists and potentially help them avoid a similar fate. The message being sent to me is very clear. Basically, be a good little girl and shut up. Or you’ll be punished.
This is WRONG. Neither of these men had a hand in the writing of those songs. They did nothing to create the relationship I have with my fans. So this is where I’m asking for your help.
Please let Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun know how you feel about this. Scooter also manages several artists who I really believe care about other artists and their work. Please ask them for help with this - I’m hoping that maybe they can talk some sense into the men who are exercising tyrannical control over someone who just wants to play the music she wrote. I’m especially asking for help from The Carlyle Group, who put up money for the sale of my music to these two men.
I just want to be able to perform MY OWN music. That’s it. I’ve tried to work this out privately through my team but have not been able to resolve anything. Right now my performance at the AMA’s, the Netflix documentary and any other recorded events I am planning to play until November of 2020 are a question mark.
I love you guys and I thought you should know what’s been going on.
Right. Is this just celebrity with a huge audience privilege whereby they get to skirt contracts they signed by leveraging their fan base to exert pressure on the other party?
Contracts she only signed because the music industry had all the leverage. A music industry that is filthy rich, and notorious for their exploitative contracts, so I wouldn't rush to their defense.
How ever much of a dick move it may or may not be from the other party, she’s absolutely guaranteed to drum up more public support for her grievance by framing it as though there was some sort of sexism involved, than she would be otherwise.
Taylor Swift signed a deal with a record label instead of being an independent artist because it seemed (and possibly was) advantageous at the time and now that she is rich and famous and doesn't need the label, she no longer wants to hold up her side of the deal (giving the label certain rights to her earlier music for a certain period of time) and so now she is playing victim to get her fans to pressure the label into giving her more generous rights to the music she signed to them.
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.
It should be noted that music label contracts are notoriously one-sided, and artists often make their labels millions without seeing a dime themselves.
Do record labels make crazy profit for the capital costs? Or are they one of those businesses where for every Taylor Swift getting screwed by not getting a fair percentage of the value of her earnings, are there 50 other artists who got a good size advance and never made any money?
I honestly don't know. I just think we have a tendency to only think about the successful artists when we evaluate the fairness of a contract.
Hallelujah. I'm honestly kind of dismayed at how many people are saying "tough shit Taylor Swift", when I hear people bitch on this site all the time about the unfairness of things like non-competes, lopsided preference rights, etc. that end up in the contracts of engineers and the startup founders.
While I don't know if it's the same people bitching about these contract provision who are also saying Taylor Swift should cry me a river, the overall tone strikes me as completely hypocritical. Just search for any post on this site about non-competes and tell me how many upvoted comments you see saying "Tough shit, why did you sign the contract then?"
I was surprised to learn recently (my son is just beginning his career in the music industry) that a lot of artists out there don't own the legal rights to their own music once they sign with a label.
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.
They want to hide that, but they also want to build up the mythos of the artist because it helps them sell more records. Apparently Tay Tay is more marketable than this dude: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Max_Mart... (arguably the best songwriter since Lennon/McCartney)
> I only have a vague idea of how the music industry works
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.
I think there are two things that weaken Swift’s message here:
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.
1) You are reading something that isn't there. In the same sense "be a good boy" could be used if she was male. Maybe I'm too old for this bullshit, but what is the problem of men being men, and women being women? Do we need to avoid genders everywhere now? Give me a break.
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.
It will be a while yet before two tyrannical men telling a little girl to shut up will fail to engender an emotive response.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think there are two things that weaken Swift’s message here
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.
Thanks for responding to my comment. I should be clearer that I think her message is weak specifically on a moral basis. That’s a bad thing because it is pretty damaging behavior to see coming from someone with so much influence over young people.
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.)
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.)
Ignoring the respect part, I don't see the analogy. No civilians are going to suffer here. She's attacking record execs. Bloodsuckers. No one's going to shed a tear.
Society as a whole suffers when our leading society members, particularly our children’s cultural leaders, act like ass hats.
There’s potentially a moral justification for rousing up mob justice if you are marginalized to the point of having no other way of making your voice heard, but Taylor Swift is literally the opposite of someone whose voice isn’t heard.
She should go fight it in court. Leave the teenage fan club out of it.
That’s true. This could be Swift’s first steps in revealing sexism’s impact on her career.
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.
I'm sure Scooter Braun, who's likely got a net worth more than Taylor Swift, is going to be OK. He can take care of himself and doesn't need you to defend him.
I honestly don’t particularly care for either party — neither Swift nor her former managers.
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.
Swift has a contractual agreement in which she doesn't like one of the terms of the agreement. Rather than offering Scooter Braun something he wants in exchange for an exception she is calling on her fans to publicly apply pressure on him. This does come across as good-faith negotiation tactics to me.
1. I don't understand how you can both point out the existence of the 2019 entertainment industry harassment crisis and think that mentioning gender will weaken her message. People are chomping at the bit to stomp on any man that wrongs a woman at the moment. Drawing attention to her and their genders is a terrific move.
2. It feels like straight up bullying because that's what this is.
>but it feels like Swift is trying to nudge it in another direction unfairly
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.
I think the big factor here is that "she" didn't sell her music herself per se. The record label, which got all rights to her music from the contract she signed, decided to sell the rights to her music to another party. She didn't really have any say on the matter if I recall.
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...
> On Sunday, June 30 [2019], it was announced that Scooter Braun and his company, Ithaca Holdings LLC, acquired Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Label Group in a deal that’s reportedly worth over $300 million. Through buying Borchetta’s company, Braun now also has ownership of Taylor Swift’s master recordings made when she was with the label, including her first six albums.
> in a deal that’s reportedly worth over $300 million
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.
Artists own the songs (melody + lyrics). Record labels own the recordings. The artist also provides a commitment that they wont re-record their songs with another label for an agreed period of time.
So she’s crying a river over being forced to live up to the obligations of contracts she willingly signed. Most of her fans reading this can only dream of having a fraction of the breaks she’s had or the money she’s made. So she won’t have a documentary about her on Netflix. Neither will anyone reading this, but somehow we’re all supposed to feel sorry or outraged for her?
Another possibility that comes to mind is a compulsory license.
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.
Pretty sure that with such a huge fan base, these guys could appear to sexually harass a couple of acquaintances or more. This is a very unstable situation happening right now, depending on their positions in the business. Maybe it’s better to let the girl sing her songs? Everyone would win.
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.