Indie Scene Industry 411
Want your music video seen by millions of college students across the U.S.?
| Location: | Online |
| Event Dates: | Aug 20, 2013 - Sep 20, 2013 |
| Submission Fee: | FREE |
| Summary: | At least one ReverbNation artist's video per month to be aired across college campuses. |
Why Smaller Artists Won't Be Joining Thom Yorke's Crusade Against Spotify - The Atlantic Wire
Independent artists need to know and understand how to market their music. This article raises the question about where you, the Indie Artist, stands on the issue of Spotify and other services of its type. Read it and let us know what you think. Independent artists need to balance royalties and exposure. Fund out why and let us know where do you stand? Read more...
Zoe Koz's insight:
Great tutorial for any musician preparing to sell their original material. Understand what licensing means to your music. Never sign
a contract without understanding all of the facets of licensing. Know
your market and ALL of it's requirements to be in business. READ MORE...
How Music Royalties Work
Introduction to How Music Royalties Work
Watch MTV or open a copy of Rolling Stone or Spin
and you'll be checking out some musical members of the entertainment
elite. The clothes, the jewelry, the cars, the clubs, the houses... One
might wonder where, exactly, all that money is coming from. How much
does the artist make from CD sales?
Bars, clubs and coffee
houses across the country are overflowing with fresh, talented
musicians who want to join the ranks of these performers. But really,
what are the chances of making it to stardom and retiring on music
royalties?
Making money in the music industry is tricky. Recording contracts
are notoriously complicated, and every big recording artist has a small
army of legal representatives to translate and negotiate these deals.
In this article, we'll look into the world of music royalties and see
how money is actually made in this industry.
Who Gets What?
The first thing we need to do is distinguish between recording-artist royalties and songwriter/publisher royalties.
In The Internet Debacle - An Alternative View, Janis Ian, a singer/songwriter, states:
If we're not songwriters, and not hugely successful commercially (as in platinum-plus), we [recording artists] don't make a dime off our recordings.
She's referring to the fact that recording artists
and songwriters do not earn royalties in the same way. Recording artists
earn royalties from the sale of their recordings on CDs, cassette tapes, and, in the good old days, vinyl. Recording artists don't earn royalties on public performances (when their music is played on the radio, on TV, or in bars and restaurants). This is a long-standing practice that's based on copyright law
and the fact that when radio stations play the songs, more CDs and
tapes are sold. Songwriters and publishers, however, do earn royalties
in these instances -- as well as a small portion of the recording sales.
The only current instance in which artists earn royalties for "public performances" is when the song is played in a digital arena (like in a Webcast or on satellite radio), is non-interactive (meaning the listener doesn't pick and choose songs to hear), and the listener is a subscriber to the service. This came about with the Digital Performance Rights in Sound Recordings Act of 1995. This act gave performers of music their first performance royalties.
We'll
go into more detail about the types of licenses and royalties later in
this article. But first, let's look at song copyrights.
READ MORE TOMORROW!!
SiriusXM Sued Over Alleged Underpayment of Royalties
Earlier this month, Flo & Eddie of The Turtles filed a proposed class action against the company for allegedly infringing millions of recordings that came before Feb. 15, 1972, when recordings began falling under federal copyright protection. The plaintiffs assert that SiriusXM has "reproduced, performed, distributed, or otherwise exploited" pre-1972 recordings without license.
On Monday came a new lawsuit against SiriusXM, with compensatory damages estimated between $50 million and $100 million. READ MORE...
ASCAP already takes the lion's share of the revenue they collect in the name of artists...now they want more?
Earlier this month, Flo & Eddie of The Turtles filed a proposed class action against the company for allegedly infringing millions of recordings that came before Feb. 15, 1972, when recordings began falling under federal copyright protection. The plaintiffs assert that SiriusXM has "reproduced, performed, distributed, or otherwise exploited" pre-1972 recordings without license.
On Monday came a new lawsuit against SiriusXM, with compensatory damages estimated between $50 million and $100 million. READ MORE...
ASCAP already takes the lion's share of the revenue they collect in the name of artists...now they want more?
Music Crowdfunding Without A Fanbase
Last week we discussed the topic of crowdfunding without a fanbase
and what they've learned from numerous campaigns and musicians who don't
have huge numbers of social media followers and, in some cases, don't
even have mailing lists.
They clarified that those are definitely things you want to have to
build your career as a musician and to raise larger sums of money. But
they also found that musicians who connect directly to the people they
do know can successfully raise funds in the $1 to $5000 range and the $5 to $10000 range.
They maintain that smaller campaigns for artists funding their first
album are generally more about supporting the individual rather than the
particular project. The individuals that successfully achieve such
goals are the ones who don't just post about their campaigns on Facebook
and the like but reach out directly to individuals with whom they have
direct connections, especially friends and family.
But the artists have to be willing to sit down and think through all
the different groups of people they know and be willing to contact each
individual and follow up to encourage pledging. This work will be much
more productive than attempting to expand one's fanbase during a
campaign and to solicit funds from new fans.
Even larger campaigns ultimately rely on the people with whom artists
have already established a connection to achieve their goal. READ MORE...
SINGING OFF
I was 16 when I first walked into a
newsroom. It was WCCM in Lawrence,
Massachusetts (city motto:
Arson Capital of the Nation!). I was a high-school senior in the town
next door. My school had an internship program where I could get out of the
hellish school day on a half-day and intern in what would allegedly be my
chosen career. I wanted to be a writer, but the local paper didn’t take high
school interns.
WCCM was happy for the free labor,
and I was treated as a very dumb member of the staff. I was amazed and
overwhelmed when I walked in. It was 1990. WCCM had reel-to-reels, round pots
on the analog studio boards, and used carts, all of which were recording
devices used in the Before Time. (Carts were great because you could throw them
at the wall and they would rarely break.) The newsroom was filled with smoke,
with stand-up Mad-Men-esque gold ashtrays everywhere. There were months’ worth
of newspapers piled in every corner. The AP and UPI wires were constantly
spewing out reams of paper from their dot matrix printers, with the wires
setting off alarm bells for “urgents”, which I learned to ignore because an
urgent could be for something as silly as a college sports score (sports
editors!) or a bulletin, which you never ignore.
We had typewriters. Typewriters!
The old brown typewriters? That’s what we had. Three versions of every story
had be written, to rotate among the newscasts. What aired at 5am didn’t air
again until 90 minutes later. I interviewed Congressmen, Senators, City Councilors,
the Mayor, community activists, criminal lawyers and DAs– you name it.
Often I was an idiot and forgot to hit both “play” and “record” on that damn
reel-to-reel. ”Do it again,” the news director said. ”I don’t give
a shit.” I would record the carts wrong, not test my sound, and hand in blank
carts for broadcast. The news director, who was also the PM drive anchor, would
come out of the studio and throw them at me, barely missing my head.
George admitted 20 years later,
when we found each other on Facebook, that he forgot I was only a teenager, and
that he was a 28-year-old asshole. He was appalled to find out I often cried in
the ladies’ room. He visits NYC frequently and I am still scared to meet with
him. I will be 40 in October.
George taught me, though. I brought
him a story I was working on for my school paper. I had heard the new gym in my
school was built wrong; that it was two small and regulation games could not be
played there. I have always been a master eavesdropper. So I interviewed the
Athletic Director. This was the wrong person to interview. I asked the
principal, who was not my pal in this story. I called the
superintendent’s office. I brought my notes to George, who, in a rare
Prozac moment, sat down and flipped through my little notebook. “You have no
idea what you’re sitting on, do you?” he asked.
It turns out what I was sitting
upon was a story involving the city council president throwing the inside bid
to a family member who owned a construction company and said construction
company then upping his lowest bid due to cost “overruns” then, indeed,
building the gym wrong not only with non-regulation specifications but with
unsafe bleachers. It lead to resignation of the city council president and
criminal charges.
It was one of the region’s biggest
stories of the year. George gave me a gift certificate to a local restaurant. The
day the Gulf War broke out, I walked into the newsroom, entranced. George told
me: ”You’re in charge of local news.” I went to the bathroom, threw up,
and went to work. George gave me my first Malboro.
I got my first broadcast paycheck
at WCCM. I was paid 25 bucks for guarding an open payphone line at Lawrence City Hall on election night so we could
get the results from the City Clerk on the air as fast as possible. I was not
to give in to the begging of reporters from WBZ, WRKO, The Lawrence
Eagle-Tribune, The Boston Globe, or The Boston Herald. This was difficult for a
teenager with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. “C’mon, honey,” the men
said, and they were all men. “Just for a second. A minute.” “No! No!”
The thrill of news was addicting,
but so were the radio shenanigans. The morning talk show man — who just marked
60 years on the air at WCCM — never seemed to have a bad day, despite getting
up at 3 am every day for decades! Tie perpetually loosened, sleeves rolled up,
cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, a mug of coffee in his hand.
“Have some fresh, hot coffee,” he said, and still says, to everyone he passes.
The other man and woman in the
newsroom took to making out in the cubicles while I silently sat a fragile wall
away, asking myself: What is the etiquette here? Do I leave the
room? That will make noise. Then the phone will ring. Then they’ll know I left.
Do I just pretend I know nothing? Do I tap my pen so they realize they are
corrupting the morals of a minor?
They’ve been married for about 20
years now. A reporter friend of mine, still in the business, describes radio as
being a real-life Island
of Misfit Toys. “We
understand each other,” he says. I loved news radio, and I’m sad to leave it,
even though I’m happy to have a stable job with a future.
My generation was probably the last
to gather round the on speakers on snowy mornings, cheering like mad when our
school was declared cancelled. We listened on election nights, to hear who was
in or out in our town, too small for the big city media to care about. We
listened to local talk shows during the day, to debate why our tax dollars were
being used for this, instead of that. We listened on our commutes, to see if we
should take I-93 or Route 128 to get to where we were going. It was a
community.
Then Radio got greedy. It lobbied
the government to get rid of the ownership rules, so a handful of companies could
control all the stations in America.
Then those companies tried to squeeze more profits out of stations, replacing
local talk shows with syndicated shows like Rush Limbaugh. That made money. So
then the companies pruned the newsrooms, arranging for two or three anchors to
handle the news on multiple stations. Detroit’s
local news is handled out of New York
now. Did you know that? There was no budget for street reporting. As for music
— well, that could be cheapened down, too. DJs were canned,
and replaced with automation systems. What played on the classic rock station
in Chicago was played on the classic rocker in New York.
It all sounds the same. And it
sounds cheap with the same voices up and down the dial. The same subtle clicks
as the computer shifts from canned music to canned announcements to
commercials. No wonder the listeners stopped tuning in. Why bother, when
nothing interesting, innovative, or exciting is going on? An iPod can
give you music without the commercial overload.
Don’t get me wrong. I like the new job. I like the people; I’m still
dealing with information and media; it’s like moving to another house in the
same neighborhood. But I need heath insurance and steady hours and sick days
and vacation. I feel like I’m divorcing my first love. The week I
started at the state job, the Boston Marathon bombing happened. And I should
have been on the air. But I wasn’t. I can’t be. What I loved doesn’t exist
anymore.
Story Published by crasstalk.com
Author: Karyn
I'm an alleged journalist who wishes to cross to the dark
side of PR. I have a fabulous cottontail. I love redheads. And I have a
vast and unrivaled collection of monkeys.
Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons
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