First Post

Where do I start?

My girlfriend is a singer, a vocalist, an entertainer. At any rate, her New Year’s goal is to complete an album by the end of 2007. And while she is an excellent singer, a good writer, and has awesome people skills, she isn’t really strong on the legal, financial or technical aspects of the music business. That’s where I come in.

I have years of business experience and decades of computer experience and it will be my task to minimize the number of errors we make in the process. Did I mention that I don't really know anything about the legal, financial or technical aspects of the music business either? Well, I don't but I have to figure it out, and quickly. Since I haven’t been able to find that many simple guides to creating an album; writing it, producing it, recording it, etc. I have decided to blog our process for others to follow.

About Copyright

She already has one song that she wrote a few years ago. Problem is she took the lyrics to a well known producer to help her get what was in her head onto tape. Since she didn’t have any written notes, she sang it for him and he keyed out the melody he heard. Then he spent about 4 hours fleshing it out and making it really hot. I have to admit, the song is smoking. Unfortunately, even though she paid for his time, it seems he stills gets credit for helping to write the song. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think he did excellent work and I am sure the song is much better for it. Thing is, she didn’t know that that would happen. That she would be automatically signing over to him 3 times what she would make on the song as the writer.

Why 3 times you ask? Well, it seems she failed to copyright the song and he did. As the person that submitted the copyright, he picked the publishing company for the song, which was, SURPRISE, his publishing company. So, what happens is when someone wants to license the song, the fee gets split 50% to the lyric writer, 50% to the music composer, which is fine. But 100% goes to the publishing company. This is supposed to be standard practice, and as far as I can tell it is. But it is damn confusing. How can the portions add up to 200%? I think it is standard practice because the average artist, hell the average person, isn't good at math and basing the apportionment of fees on a 200% percentage tends to make the artist believe that they are getting the lion's share of the royalties, not getting the short end of the stick. It may be standard practice, but is massively misleading.

The only reason we found out is a small business licensed the song for a commercial, but since my vocalist knows the business owner, she knows that the owner had to write 3 checks, not 2. So basically, $300 got divided $225/$75. Which, when you are not expecting it, blows. It blows big time.

Lesson
Pay attention to copyright. Pay a lot of attention. If someone helps you on lyrics or music in even the least little bit, get a contract laying out exactly what percentage of the final composition is attributable to whom, and always always copyright your work yourself.

So now the situation is this. We love this song. We absolutely love this song. And if we include it on the album, then this producer will get a disproportionate share of the profits from this song. That is if he even allows us to use the song. Yeah, his publishing company, his decision, how’s that for a hoot? So do we use the song as is and suck up the mistake, or do we redevelop it with a different composer, our copyright and our publishing company?

Well, luckily, it seems that for all that we got blindsided by the “way things are done” that the producer is basically a cool guy and he will let us use the song in the album as long as he gets his standard percentages. So we will probably be able to use the song as it is, but we have learned a very expensive lesson.