Recording - September 2011 - 52

Continued from page 51 composition. So we have the Library of Congress where you register your copyrights, and when you register them, you have to register them with either the master recording and/or the composition. So you can do both on one form, or you can only own the sound recording and you copyright that. You know, copyright registrations take a long time, even with their online submission process, and it’s important to register your songs with the copyright office. The down-and-dirty way to do it is make a recording of it, burn it to a CD, mail it to yourself with the lyrics, and that will give you some sort of protection. But if there’s ever any sort of litigation on your composition or your sound recording, you get more out of actually having it registered with the Library of Congress. It’s funny. I get asked that question all the time. “Really, the poor man’s copyright, can’t I just mail it to myself?” And I’ve often heard that doesn’t work. But we had Donald Passman—you guys know who he is, right? The guy who wrote Everything You Need to Know About the Music Business, kind of a standard in the industry. But we had Passman as our keynote one year, and I went to have lunch with him before the Rally and I said, “Answer this for me. The poor man’s down-and-dirty copyright, does it hold any water?” And he said, “Well, obviously, the right way to do it is to register it with the Library of Congress. But better than having nothing at all, yeah, mail it to yourself.” Something that proves that you created it and when you created it, but I strongly recommend that you register everything you do with the Library of Congress. Do your due diligence, get your stuff copyrighted. Define what a publisher is. Give us the difference between a film and TV publisher and a traditional publisher that would pitch to an artist on a major label. Well, a traditional publisher will do an agreement with you and they will acquire the rights to the composition. A lot of publishers these days also may ask for control of the master as well. And in the true form of a traditional publisher they will take your composition or your recording and pitch it for all types of usage—major artist to cut you song, as well as film and TV placement. They may or may not help in radio promotion. It just depends on how versatile the publisher is. So that’s a traditional publisher. A film and TV publisher basically only gets the rights from you to pitch to film and television, and there are a variety of different deals, which we will get into a little bit later of how those film and TV licensing agreements work. What’s an administrator?
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An administrator will take your composition and only [take]—depends on the terms, but it usually ranges from 10 to 25%. They don’t own your composition, you still own the composition. Whereas, the difference between a publisher and an administrator is that a traditional publisher will require all your rights. They own the composition and, hopefully, they’ve paid you some money for that. A film and TV publisher is sort of in between an administrator and a regular publisher. But an administrator

They do the best they can in terms of tracking and getting you paid. But if you’re gonna be in this business, you’d better realize that a certain percentage of your performance income is going to be lost. Won’t the day come where every piece of music that appears on film and TV is watermarked, and some computer is going to count that versus the hocus pocus formulas that the PROs use to calculate what you do? Are they fighting that, because it kind of obfuscates the need to have a PRO, and they’re really large companies with strong representation in Washington? Or do you think we will see a day in our lifetime where composers will get paid for every single spin of their stuff on film or TV. It is technologically possible. [laughter] Uh-huh, I get it… a politically correct answer! What is an exclusive agreement? Somebody said to me in the hallway, “Make sure you ask her about retitling,” which is part of the whole exclusive/nonexclusive thing. An exclusive deal is an agreement that you sign with a film and TV rep or a publishing company or a record label, where they are the only people that have the right to pitch your music for you. You cannot work with anybody else; you are depending on them to pitch you music and make money for you. That’s an exclusive. A non-exclusive, which is legal… I mean ringtones are sold on a non-exclusive basis. Your music is on CD Baby, or however many places that you’re selling your music for digital downloads. Those are non-exclusive. In a way, when there was brick and mortar, when you sold your CD at a retail store, that is a non-exclusive, because more than one person has the right to sell your music. So the non-exclusive is that somebody is pitching your music, you have an agreement in place, but you also have an agreement with somebody else to allow them to pitch your music as well, and you can pitch your music too. So that’s the non-exclusive. Explain what a derivative is. Well, derivative itself in the purest sense is a work based on another work. So, for example, Romeo and Juliet by Tchaikovsky is a derivative of Romeo and Juliet, the story by Shakespeare. So that is a true derivative. In the music world, a derivative is when somebody takes your piece of music and edits it down from five minutes to two minutes. Not just cutting off an intro, but heavily editing it so that it works for film and television. That becomes a derivative work of your original work. And in a derivative agreement, you actually hand over the copyright to the derivative work to the publisher or the perContinued on page 55

“If you’re gonna be in this business, you’d better realize that a certain percentage of your performance income is going to be lost.” —Tanvi Patel
basically handles all the paperwork, the international collections and the registrations. They’re listed as the publisher on any cue sheets, and have 100%. And then when they collect that 100%, they will forward 80 to 90% to you, depending on your agreement. An administrator is very useful for very large commercial artists whose name carries their song. So if they don’t want to hand it over to a publisher to handle their songs—that is, if they haven’t already signed from way back-an administrator is a great for them, because they don’t have to do the leg work or [deal with] getting paid or the international collections. The administrator will handle all that. A good administrator will also pitch your music to film and TV, but their main job is to collect and do all the paperwork for you worldwide. If a TAXI member gets a call from a music supervisor and they don’t have a publisher and they don’t have an administrator, are they capable of chasing down the money on a worldwide basis on their own? Yeah, they are. All they have to do is get a copy of the cue sheet from the show. If you are personally handling this, hopefully, you can get a copy of a license somewhere online, and you issue the license. And part of that license will typically have the fact that the production has to give you a cue sheet. Then you can follow up with it and make sure that ASCAP… It is the responsibility of the production to get a cue sheet to ASCAP, BMI or SESAC, but it doesn’t always happen. You need to wait. I think they pay like nine months out from the first airdate. So if you haven’t been paid for something placed in the fourth quarter, you probably won’t get paid until I believe like the third quarter. And you should wait until the third quarter passes, because you don’t want to inundate them. They have thousands of writers and millions of cue sheets to deal with. So you don’t want to inundate them with that, but you can send the cue sheet to them afterwards and collect. You know, it is what it is with the PROs.

Recording - September 2011

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