Recording - September 2011 - 55

going to sit up here and say which one’s better. It’s totally up to you. Can I present a couple of sides of it? On one hand, yeah, you want your stuff out there. You want your stuff exploited as much as you can possibly get it exploited. I know Tanvi is a gold-plated person and runs a gold-plated company, and I would have no problem doing a retitle with her in a non-exclusive deal in a heartbeat. We don’t retitle anymore. That’s right. Forgive me. There was a phone call some months ago—I won’t go into it, but they don’t retitle anyway. But they do have a unique identifier that goes in front of the title. Which serves as the same revenue stream sepa-

rator, that’s correct. Right. It accomplishes the goal without creating the retitle. And why did we switch? Some networks got uncomfortable with the retitling, and understandably so. Why didn’t we do it from the beginning with the catalog number? Because it’s a lot of administrative nightmares for us to deal with catalog numbers. But in order to keep ourselves in business with the networks that we work with, we had to switch over. And it is a lot of work, you can ask my staff. But it works just as well as the retitling. Read and learn more from Tanvi in Part 2, which will be next month’s TAXI Insider!

Continued from page 52 son you did the deal with, but you retain the original copyright, because essentially they are two different pieces because of technology. Before technology you couldn’t have that sort of thing. And I’ve actually talked to the copyright office about it and they have corroborated what I’m telling you. It is legal and kosher. It’s legal; it’s just about how comfortable you are about handing over your copyright. Retitling. All of a sudden libraries started retitling, and everybody’s like, “Wow, I can do these nonexclusive deals and get myself retitled and have it in five different libraries. So I’ve got five different people pitching my music. That’s awesome. I don’t have to sign an exclusive deal and rely on one person.” I don’t think it was originally created for the same piece of music to end up in five libraries. But that’s just the way it went. So talk about retitling and how it got abused. Part of the derivative is that you create a new title. Because it’s a new copyright, you’re actually giving it a new title, and giving it a new title has a lot more to do with being able to market it in a marketing sense. But it’s so that the copyright exists separately from the original, so you’ve given it a different title. So you could work the retitled version for film and TV. Let’s take the song “I Love You, Mary.” I write a song called “I Love You, Mary.” I own the original copyright. You hear it and go, “I can shop this for film and TV; let’s call it ‘Mary Loves Me,’” and you retitle it. Now, you control that one and get it out there, but I can still take my version and give it to Celine Dion to cut on her record. That’s all true, right? Yes. The reason why retitling has flourished, in film and television specifically, is… Regardless of whether you’re exclusive or non-exclusive, it’s a way for the publisher to be able to make money on your track as a result of their efforts of placing the track, and not having to worry about the crossover of revenue from the PROs. So if you go out there and pitch your own stuff under your original title, and you’ve registered it with a PRO, it remains separate. And that’s really the sole reason, because, you know, even an exclusive agreement is going to have a term. By term I mean it’s gonna be a year or two years or three years, and typically the publisher retains the publishing on those placements in perpetuity, which means forever. So, even if you’re no longer pitched by the publisher, they are still going to receive their share as a result of the placement. That is why retitling exists. And, yes, there’s hoopla at the moment… And it is what it is. It’s what you’re comfortable with—whether you want an exclusive or a non-exclusive. I’m not

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Recording - September 2011

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