Recording - April 2016 - 51

APRIL 2016
TAXI Road Rally 2015

Succeeding in the New Music Industry, Keynote Interview, Part 3
Michael Laskow, Moderator
PANEL MEMBERS:
John Rudolph, Chairman, Elias Arts
Jeff Freundlich, COO, Wired Whirled Music
Brian McNelis, Sr.Vice President of Music
and Soundtracks, Lakeshore Entertainment
Editor's Note: This part of the Keynote Interview might be a little tricky to follow, but it's
extremely important information about the
future of the music industry and how your
rights as creators are affected today, and could
be affected in the future.
The discussion can be very technical as it
relates to rights issues. It might take reading
some sections twice to grasp it! I know, because
I had to read some of the sections more than
twice to edit them, and make them a little easier to follow. If you hang in there and invest the
time it takes to read and grasp these critical
issues, you could be far ahead of many other
songwriters and composers, and hopefully be a
leader in protecting composers' rights in the
near future!
Jeff, what's your take on the TV networks or production companies building in-house music
libraries?
Jeff: I cannot believe I'm saying this, but I'm
gonna say it. Two years ago somebody
respectable in the industry, like somebody that
I had a lot of respect for, came to me and said,
"We have a great opportunity on a TV show.
We will pay you $200,000, but we are going to
retitle everything in your library and we're
gonna take half the publishing. And I told the
guy to get lost. We are not doing that. The system was not set up for this purpose, but you
can exploit the system and do these things.
You're right about TuneSat. There are false positives; it's kind of like this algorithm that gets
out there and says, "Okay, I'm listening to your
audio file, and I think I'm hearing it in this
show," and it's successful. But the truth is, until
BMI and ASCAP and SESAC stand up and say,

Brian McNelis (right) must have said something pretty funny when he got big laughs from fellow panelists Jeff Freundlich (left)
and John Rudolph (center) during their panel at TAXI's 2015 Road Rally.

"Stop doing this," it's going to run rampant in
the industry, and it already is. I mean, we've
walked away from a lot of deals that would be
very lucrative, but at the end of the day, we
decided that it was not who we are, it's not who
we want to be. We felt that all we have is our
integrity and would rather do things the way
that we think it's supposed to be, which is that
you are writing music, and we are representing
it, and here it goes. You can license it from us,
and we'll even give it to you at a good rate, but
you're not going to start taking a piece of
our pie.
I want to clear up something that you said, just
as a precursor to this topic. You know, you were
talking about that writer's share as being sacrosanct, and I just want to be clear... I don't know
if there are people in this room that are aspiring to be composers on TV shows. I was on the
soundstage at NCIS yesterday just hanging out.
They are a good client of ours, and we were
just shooting the breeze or whatever. But the
composer on that show has two people below
him that also write for that show, and they're

work-for-hire agreements, right? And under the
copyright law with work-for-hire, you are not
entitled under work-for-hire to receive your
writer's share. It can be granted, and it needs to
be granted to you through like a federal writing. I'm sure you've got legal experts here on
panels that can speak more to this, but I would
never take somebody's writer share. To me, I
don't think that's the right thing to do. I know
some companies that do that as well. But if you
are trying to become a composer for a TV show
or film, the chances are you'll probably have a
work-for-hire deal where maybe you're working
under another composer, and you might be
doing 80% of the work, but you might only get
10% of the writer's share. That's kind of a reality of how you... I don't want to say everybody,
but many people, that's how they start. It's an
apprenticeship. And that's legal, so yeah, I
think writer's share is sacrosanct, and you
should kind of eat what you kill, so to speak. If
you do the work, you should get the money. But
I think in reality, that's not necessarily how it
works if you're composing for...
Continued on page 52
51

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - April 2016