Music Publishers Demanding Musicians Hand Over More Rights

from the protecting-artists,-huh? dept

Wed, Jul 28th 2010 4:16am — Mike Masnick

It would be amusing to watch the various parts of the legacy music business fight with each other over who can screw over artists faster if it weren't so sad. The latest, found on Hypebot, is that music publishers -- who used to be considered the part of the business whose interests were most "aligned" with songwriters -- are now demanding the equivalent of "360 deals" from artists. Basically, since their own business is struggling, they're trying to demand more rights from artists, who increasingly have other options and don't need to deal with such middlemen. What's amusing, of course, is that these publishers keep pretending they actually have the songwriters best interests at heart. Yeah, right.

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Filed Under: 360 deals, music publishers, rights

13 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2010 @ 4:40am

The recording publisher can't really offer you anything but a few pennies on the dollar.
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Felix Pleșoianu, 28 Jul 2010 @ 4:43am

The paradox of control...
...is that the more you squeeze your fist, the more sand escapes through your fingers. That's how most tyrants lose, by demanding so much that everyone turns against them. The music industry leaders are no exception. Good riddance!
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2010 @ 5:17am

Whats a 360 deal? The article doesn't explain that.
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2010 @ 5:22am

Re:
360 deals are usually when the publisher does everything , like setting up concerts, merchandising and "fan connectivity". In reality they outsource that to the same people who would have done it for the musicians without the need of a big label.
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2010 @ 5:26am

Re: Re:
360 deals are usually when the publisher does everything, like setting up concerts, merchandising and "fan connectivity". In reality they outsource that to the same people who would have done it for the musicians without the need of a big label, and make a indenture servant of the artist in the process

Now that is better.
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Richard (profile), 28 Jul 2010 @ 5:46am

Re: Re:
and more importantly take a cut of everything the musician earns - regardless of how they do it.
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abc gum, 28 Jul 2010 @ 5:52am

Re: Re: Re:
Indentured servitude for the musicians, pissing in the wind for the publishers.
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TAMPuppet, 28 Jul 2010 @ 6:06am

But Mike. There must be more to this story because otherwise I wouldn't have a valid argument.
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Hephaestus (profile), 28 Jul 2010 @ 7:31am

Re: The paradox of control...
"the more you squeeze your fist, the more sand escapes through your fingers. That's how most tyrants lose, by demanding so much that everyone turns against them."

Funny thing is, most tyrants dont see it as tyranny, they see it as their right. Rights granted by law, by god, or by agreement. They never seem to realize, they themselves created or inherited these rights. Rights that were created in a self serving manner, to take away the rights of others.
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2010 @ 9:46am

Seems odd to me that in the age of the internet we still have so many middlemen. Amazon? One huge middleman. Walmart? Gets between the producer and the consumer.
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2010 @ 10:23am

Re:
See, now these middle men make a lot more sense. Amazon is like a delivery platform, which puts everything in one convenient place

And Walmart, it's products are generally the kind that aren't looked for specifically. I mean, sure, you might like a certain brand of paper towels, but you're don't care enough about them to go to each brand-makers website and order specifically. Once again, it's about convenience, and Walmart provides the shelf-space so that products can be found.
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vivaelamor (profile), 28 Jul 2010 @ 10:48am

Re:
"Seems odd to me that in the age of the internet we still have so many middlemen. Amazon? One huge middleman. Walmart? Gets between the producer and the consumer."

I don't know a lot about Walmart, but Amazon at least are pretty good at offering useful services at reasonable prices. Middlemen who make things easier are a good thing.

As an example, Amazon offer a hosting service. The service is targeted at middlemen because hosting is a great example of economies of scale. If the middlemen all hosted their own stuff then it would cost them far more than it costs to use Amazon's service. If Amazon tried to serve everyone directly then it would not have the resources. It's easy to offer a lot of bandwidth and space, it's not so easy to deal with each user of that bandwidth and space as a customer.
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Damian Byrne (profile), 28 Jul 2010 @ 11:07am

Perfect example of non-understanding of the market
This is a perfect example of how label executives simply don't understand competitive behaviour. If you think of it like an employment contract, they want to get the best artists. Any other industry would scramble over themselves to give dental/medical cover etc, higher wages and other perks, to attract the best people, and ensure they don't go to their competitors. Now here we have the music label, making themselves look worse than their competitors (self-publishing, indie labels etc).
Its kinda like the Catholic Church recently calling on all of their homosexual priests to resign, in the midst of their lowest staffing level in history (here In Ireland, only one new priest was ordained in the past year).
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