Hello, fellow Sneakers! This week it’s David and Ian alone at Sneaky Dragon HQ to discuss pie shortages, the Play-Doh rip-off, bad food combinations, problems with the whole round table design, power pop, Mini-Pops and chipmunk pop. They try to figure out how song publishing works and we learn once again that Dave doesn’t know what you mean.
We wrote and asked our friend David M. how the heck rights to song performance works and this was his reply:
“Any musician can do any song they like, but the song publisher and the songwriter have some ability to block versions they don’t like, if they feel it’s damaging to the song (parodies get some special consideration).For movies or TV, the songwriter gets royalties, by agreement with the copyright holders of the production. For instance, I was paid $400 for my signature on a contract with Suzanne Tabata for the use of “Mindless Aggression” in “Bloodied But Unbowed”, which was an amount $100 less than it should have been to cover all rights for video releases as well, but she asked if the lesser amount was okay and I said yes. She needed contracts with all the songwriters with songs in her film, because she was getting government funding and needed everything done on the up-and-up, but clearly under normal circumstances the details of the necessary songwriter contracts are negotiable in both directions. “Velvet Goldmine” was refused permission outright by David Bowie for the use of his songs, for example, and I doubt that “The Life Aquatic” paid him a huge amount, but he was agreeable.If the songwriter has a contract with a song publisher, that would determine where the royalties go. John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t have sufficient control over the songs they wrote to stop Robert Stigwood from making the Bee Gees’ movie with new recordings of the songs. The ownership of the actual recordings used is another issue, of course, but in the case of something like “Bloodied But Unbowed”, there weren’t any cover versions for anybody to worry about.The Brazilian guy would have a separate contract, with nothing to do with song royalties involved, but the contract would use his actual name, unless maybe there was only one obvious ‘the Brazilian guy’.”
I think we can all agree that once again, Ian was right!
Don’t forget that if you’d like it’s still possible to vote for Sneaky Dragon in the Georgia Straight’s Best of Vancouver poll. You only have to answer thirty questions to get us a clean third place finish!
Thanks for listening.
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Devoid of context, the part about “the Brazilian guy” looks mighty odd.
I put out a record a few years back. On it we included a cover version of “Hats Off to Larry” by Del Shannon. I don’t recall the exact mechanism behind it, but we had to fill out some forms and send it off to an agency who handles this sort of stuff with a cheque for a specific amount per unit produced. I seem to recall it being $0.25 per CD, but I may be wrong. Like I said, I had someone who knows how to do that stuff handle it. While the composer may have some control over it, I think that’s pretty much a formality. I think likely my cheque for $100 went into Del’s bank account and he doesn’t even know I ever butchered his song.
Thanks, David, for once again being open about your life and its foibles. I, similarly, saw my marriage dissolving, but was too weak to confront it directly. It resulted in some truly execrable behavior as I refused to make the hard decisions and the hurt feelings were much worse in the end for hanging on to the crumbling edifice of the relationship because (in my wimpy mind) I didn’t want to hurt my partner directly. I think I could do without the lessons learned, but what do I know?