Royalty Free Music VS Classical Cues

(This is a Simul-post from ClassicalCues.blogspot.com a music licensing blog that I contribute to.) I happened to stumble upon a fantastic blog post today while looking at my Google Alert updates. The post comes from a blog called MediaMusicNow. This is the blog of a British entrepreneur named Lee Pritchard who started a royalty-free music company which goes by the same name. The reason I make it a point to bring attention to this blog is the great simplicity in which Lee explains the licensing process. Starting with the conventional old-school major label model and moving to his own royalty free model, he explains much of the intracacies in very easy to read graphs and visuals that help even the most un-initiated get a feeling for the processes involved.

From the 3 main aspects of licensing

To the "old" standard of music licensing

Normally I am not an outspoken fan of royalty-free music as many companies in the sphere have (in my own opinion) de-valued recorded music - at least commercial recorded music. (I believe the phrase “Royalty-Free Music” is a bit of an oxymoron) Many of their buyout plans and bargain basement pricing make it nearly impossible for a label to compete and it just tends to make life a bit more difficult for folks like myself who represent a record label. The only saving grace for a record label is to rest assured that the superb quality of your recordings will out-weigh the discount of having picked your music up from a royalty free music library. Even with my internal feelings about the concept of royalty free music, I am able to find quite a few comparisons in the usage of Classical music for licensing projects and these royalty free one-stops. I would say approximately 85% of the deals I do involve music that is in the public domain, thus removing the publisher from the equation. At that point, I am basically serving as a one-stop licensing solution much as MediaMusicNow and the other companies in that part of the business. One-stop shopping and quick turnaround on deals is one of the things we pride ourselves on and no-doubt this is something that is important to filmmakers and other professionals on a tight production time line.

I urge anyone wishing to learn more about the process of music licensing, copyright and the music industry to check out Lee’s blog as it is chalked-full of great information. Heck, I even urge you to license some music from him for your next project as long as it isn’t Classical music . For that, you of course know to look here!

Evan Roth's "Intellectual Property A$$hole Competition"

This is AWESOME! I just happened across this site and quite obviously, the title sucked me in. Evan Roth, self-proclaimed Bad Ass Mother Fucker is an American artist based out of Hong Kong. His bio states that he has interests in technology, tools of empowerment, open source and popular culture (definately someone I would like to have a beer with). Coolest of all, he is the number one result from a "bad ass mother fucker" google search. Impressive as I would have surely thought it would have been Samuel Jackson or this

So onto the competition. Evan has staged a competition to see who will deliver a cease and desist quicker... an artist who uses pop culture to become abundantly wealthy, or the Associated Press- who claims to own the copyright on the photo (of our president). To fuel the fire, Evan has painted canvas versions of BOTH the inFamous "Hope" poster and the actual picture and is now selling them on his site. I cannot wait to see what the outcome of this is...

Below is a link to the blog as well as the text from the "contest." http://evan-roth.com/

Intellectual Property Asshole Competition: OBEY vs AP

Who is the bigger intellectual property asshole? Is it the artist who has amassed a small fortune based on "appropriation" yet still sends cease and desist letters to other artists for appropriating his work?

Or is it the largest (and only) US based nationally-oriented news service which fails to recognize "fair use" even when it literally stares them in the face?



I have created hand painted canvases of Shepard Fairy's Obama Hope poster, and Mannie Garcia's Associated Press photograph and put them for sale on my website here and here.

The first person to send me a cease and desist notice wins!



..... stay tuned for updates on the winner.

(For those unfamiliar with the Shepard Fairy / Associated Press intellectual property battle over the Obama Hope poster, here is a good place to start.)



(via evan-roth.com)

Thanks go to Evan for stirring it up!! At the very least, one could say he is "ballsy."

Remix: the Movie...

Nashville Film Festival brought some very interesting films to the Music City...  Opening night brought about appearances from the likes of William Shatner, Vincent D'On0frio, Sheryl Crow,William Lee Golden from the Oakridge boys, Mayor Karl Dean, and many others.  Although many great films were involved, I must say that one film had a real impact on me.

RiP: a Remix Manifesto is the story of Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig and the changing culture of shared music, copyright law, fair use and usage of music that benefits artists...  In short the gray copyright law is taken to task with this great cinematic piece... best of all IT IS AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR FREE VIEWING, REMIXING, ETC!

I urge anyone interested in this subjectmatter to take a look at this film... it is both entertaining and informative... I am so glad it is available for online viewing...

Viva la Girl Talk

Yo Ho, Yo Ho a Pirate's Life for me (not really)

AAARGH! So just in case you have been under a rock for the last 5 days, the ruling is in... the founders of Pirate Bay have been found guilty in a Swedish court of law.  They have all been sentenced to one year in prison and will have to pay approximately $3 Million in damages (after the appeals process- if the ruling stands).

So what now?

The facilitators have been stopped, but what does that mean for all of the users (Pirates) populating Pirate Bay?  What does this mean for the bay?  Will it suddenly dry up?  No.  In a word... No.  This really means nothing.  The Swedish courts have placed their finger in the dyke... they have stopped the spillage for a moment, but the flood waters will remain.  The Pirate Bay remains active... servers housed safely outside of Sweden... and the pirates sail on.

There is a lot of debate going on over whether the founders of TPB were injustly convicted... whether the ISPs should be held responsible as well.  I think there are a lot of people at fault here including all named previously and in some way, I would love to see them held responsible.  However, I am a realist.  I understand that the times are changing and our industry needs to find better ways of making a living (outside of suing).  Ultimately,  the results of the pending appeals will leave a legacy of rulings that will affect the way our courts view file sharing for years to come.  The next few years will no doubt be an interesting lot...  time will tell.

As a sideline to this story, there has been a recent study stating that "pirates" are 10 times more likely to buy online music than law-abiding non-pirates.  The number of participants in the study was rather small (less than2000), but I find it quite interesting and wonder if this is in fact the way it is... according to the comments below the story- the pirates doubt it as well.