Monthly Archive for June, 2008Page 2 of 3

Immortal Technique Interview, Part 2

published
on June 18, 2008
by
ACtual
in culture, genres, interview, music, and music business
. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

On Monday I posted part 1 of my interview from last week with Immortal Technique. In it, he touched on his method of writing music and creating albums, his inspiration, his time in prison and his previous work with DJ Green Lantern. In part 2 of this interview, Tech talks more about his upcoming release The 3rd World (due out June 24th), capitalism, the foreign policies of the US and perception of Third World countries. Check back Friday for the third and final installment of this interview.

AC: It’s my understanding that the title of this album, The 3rd World, is also a metaphor that looks at the recording industry as being almost US Imperialistic-like, and the underground scene being more of a 3rd world country, is that correct?

IT: Absolutely. And even in the way we’re presented, they present the underground as some little backwards ass place where nothing really gets done, the same way they say, “the only way that some of these 3rd world countries can be efficient, the only way you dark people can have any sort of success is to privatize everything. Privatize your water, your communications, your transportation industries, sell us your diamonds, sell us the rights to your oil.” And that’s what the industry does when it comes in to deal with another artist. “In order for you to get on, what you have to do is change your image, take the political content out of your music, change the way we market you, sell us your masters, sell us your publishing, sign a 360 deal where we get a huge percentage of your merch and your fucking shows.” And I’ve always looked at that as utter ridiculousness, and I can’t accept stuff like that.

In the same way that that’s done to our people overseas, that’s done to us here. And we’re not any more efficient than anyone else. We think that because of the technological advances of our society that that makes us morally superior and more civilized than anybody else? America still has election fraud just like West Africa; we just had that in 2000. We still assassinate our own presidents; we just did that what, 35, 40 years ago? And after that, Bobby Kennedy? And we’ve had political assassinations after that. We have a high murder rate, we’re a gun culture, we’re no better than anybody else. We’ve definitely funded horribly authoritarian regimes, and then we sort of step away from that.

I look at the example of El Salvador, where we put 1.8 billion dollars a year into a Civil War to fund paramilitary death squads. And because we’re not physically on the ground doing it, we step away from that as if we had nothing to do with the repercussions of it and the horrible human rights abuses, the torture, rape and murder that even ended up claiming the life of an Archbishop of the Catholic church simply because he was telling the troops that were funded by American money and the CIA that it was un-Christian to oppress their own people. And it was un-Christian to commit political genocide against people who thought differently from them. And that it was the will of God and Jesus Christ to show mercy to the poor and to realize how corporations were exploiting people. That’s not Christian Socialism, fucking idiot, that’s Christianity, that’s the spirit of Jesus Christ.

If I come into a room and you’re having a debate with somebody, and I give you a set of kitchen knives, or I give you a gun, and I leave the room and I say, “Handle your business,” and lock the door behind me, just because I’m not in the same room as you when you do what you need to do, or when you do what I put you up to do so I can gain the benefit of you controlling that room economically, that doesn’t alleviate me from the moral responsibility of what has happened there. And I think that that’s something that the American empire will have to admit or it will destroy it in the long run, because truth crushed will always come to light. I’m afraid that Leo Strauss, father of Neoconservatism, was deathly wrong. It wasn’t that Liberalism failed. It was that America became schizophrenic, because on the one hand it claimed to be the bastion of freedom and democracy, and on the other hand, it was a racist police state for Black people and it was spreading its own brand of Imperialism to the rest of the world, just like Russia was. What Russia did to Eastern Europe and Asia was the same thing that America was doing to West African and all of Latin America and the Caribbean. So where’s our moral high ground? Didn’t we do deals with the Taliban before? You want to find excuses for all of this, that’s fine, but you’re just lying to yourself. These aren’t conspiracy theories, these are real life issues. We created the Saddam Husseins, we created Manuel Noriega, because we needed people like that.

AC: Now tying that back into the labels of the underground, what do you think the underground labels need to do, both separately and together, need to do in order to create the kind of backlash needed to change the current industry structure?

IT: Really just make music that has soul. Make music that you want to. I know that there is a trend to just make music that’s radio friendly, this one’s for the radio, this one’s for the bitches, quote unquote. I just make music and then after the album is done, I say to myself, “ok, what can I see playing on the radio? What is more for the streets?” Whereas other people tailor their music for this or that, or they’re like, “Oh, yo, this isn’t a really dope song, these aren’t really great lyrics, but this would probably make a really hot ringtone.” Like, at that point, what the fuck are you really doing?

AC: That leads me to an interesting question. Lately, I don’t know if you’ve been reading about it, but there’s been a few really well publicized stabs at independently releasing albums for free on the internet by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. Do you think those releases were an important step in the way the industry is changing, or does the fact that both of these groups were already well established and wealthy enough to release an album for free make it more of a publicity stunt than anything else?

IT: That’s an interesting argument. I mean, can you have Capitalism without capital? That’s essentially what the argument is. Could America have had an Industrial Revolution without the capital it built up from slavery? Probably not. The reason that we abolished slavery was not because we had some sort of guilty conscience. Even in the beginning of the 1900s, they kept African people in the Bronx Zoo as proof that they were the link between man and monkey. They used to keep Pygmy Africans there. I mean, this is reality. Racism was backed up by Eugenicists, by racial science, by the church even, in order to justify continuing the profit margins of slave traders and one subsection of the country. Whereas the other side realized, “You know what? It’s much more efficient for us to be able to have free men do their labor. They work much more efficiently than slaves, and we don’t have to pay for anything. They have to pay for their own things.” The money that they get is regenerated and recycled into the economy itself, it creates a stronger economy.

In the same respect, I have to say that that’s a beautiful concept, and if someone blew up just doing that and giving away their music for free, then obviously they had some other job, but I guess these cats have the benefit of already having a multi-million dollar success. But I wouldn’t necessarily categorize it as publicity stunt or something that was done with some sort of two-faced attempt at garnering even more of a fan base. I mean, it seems like they were just honestly putting their reputation to the test with their fans. They could have miserably failed, and it could have done nothing, and it could have been broke, but they gambled the right way. Obviously they have a very loyal fan base. It’s something that I guess, you’re right, can only be done with a fan base that’s committed to the artist.

AC: Now going off on fan bases, you tour and you make a point of spreading your music outside of the US. What have you seen as the state of record industries in other countries, and how has going abroad helped you spread your message and build your base?

IT: Well I can spit in English and Spanish, so definitely anytime I’m in front of a Latin American audience, or a Spanish speaking audience in Spain, we’ve been able to look at that and think to ourselves, or I think to myself, how far this hip-hop culture has actually come. In other ways though, I look at it and think that in Africa and Latin America, when I’ve been there, people don’t buy anything but bootleg albums. No one goes to the store to pay the equivalent of 10 dollars for a CD because that’s literally like a week’s wage.

AC: The word of mouth surrounding you obviously has been increasing greatly in the last few years, and you’ve done this all without the major labels’ help. For someone like you who was told that the marketing of your music would be difficult, and your content would be difficult to sell, how have you attacked self-marketing, and what has the growing success meant in terms of changing your strategy now?

IT: Lots of people, not just the record labels, told me that this wasn’t going to be lucrative or that no one was going to care, but I was fortunate enough to believe in myself and say, listen, I’m going to do whatever I want, with or without the express permission of other people. There’s no gatekeeper for me. I don’t need somebody to co-sign me to put me on.

Anyone who has supported me has never been because I twisted their arm, it’s been out of the goodness of their own heart because they felt the truth in the music. So I think in terms of marketing myself, I don’t need to create a rap persona, or a different personality in order to sell records. For me, it’s just as simple as getting the word out and getting the music to people. The music sells itself, and the message sells itself. It creates an even stronger support base because we’re drawing in from lots of people who don’t get their struggle talked about, lots of people who never really had the benefit of Hip-Hop addressing some of the issues that they’re dealing with.

For example, I have a song called “Harlem Renaissance” on The 3rd World, wherein we take the struggles like what goes on in Bosnia or Kurdistan, where people are being ethnically cleansed, and struggles in Palestine where people are losing their land to a foreign government’s occupation, and we relate that directly to what goes on in the inner city communities where we’re being ethnically cleansed economically. Where gentrification is changing the face of the neighborhood, but not for us, because the only reason they’re making the neighborhood better is so we can get the fuck out so they can raise the rent or create condominiums that go for 1.5 million dollars, and in the hood, you know people don’t have that type of money. So essentially what you’re saying is “Get the fuck out.” Like one of those rich country clubs, where it’s like, “You know what, it’s not that we don’t want Black and Latino people here, it’s just that it costs $150,000 to be here, so we know who’s going to be here, we know who’s not going to be here.”

In the same way that in the future, there will be a racism based on the reality that there will be different races. There will be a race of people who can afford to be genetically modified and say, “I don’t get AIDS like the rest of you fucking people. I don’t get cancer like you. I was fixed from the point that I was conceived and had different genes added to me to where I’m not as susceptible to levels of cold and heat the way you are, my skin doesn’t develop cancer the way yours does when exposed to this climate.” There will be people who are specifically tailored that way, and that’s going to be based on money as well. All of these things, whether or not we know it, are creating even more divisions in our society, so we know who’s going to be able to afford that sort of modification, and it damn sure ain’t gonna be the majority of the people in Africa or Latin America or Southeast Asia. It’s going to be rich people living in the 1st world. And those of us that look like our people, that will be able to afford that, are only that because they’ve been working for people who have been exploiting our land, and those traditionally are the people who control this country. (Editor’s Note: For an interesting fictional representation of the type of expensive genetic modifications Tech envisions here, check out Gattaca.)

Click on this link for the third and final installment of the interview where Tech talks about the current music industry, remix work, internet piracy and the upcoming Presidential election.

A Music History Primer

published
on June 17, 2008
by
Alan Khalfin
in music business and music history
. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

The music “industry” has always been an extremely dynamic field that has paralleled the steady evolution of technology, business and society. The industry as we know it is more appropriately referred to as the record industry that began in the early 20th Century with the invention of the gramophone. But, the emergence of modern music is a relatively new development, as for the majority of its history, music was neither considered a form of entertainment nor a secular art.

Music (in some form or another) was an aspect of every ancient civilization, but was used in connection with religious rites/ceremonies. Similarly in medieval times, music was almost exclusively affiliated with social and religious rites and ceremonies. The secularization of music did not commence until the Renaissance, which began in the 14th Century and lasted until the middle of the 17th Century. Yet, until the 18th Century, the process of composing and printing music was mostly commissioned by the royalty and the church. In the mid to late 18th Century, performers and composers began to be commissioned by members of the aristocracy, thereby giving them commercial opportunities to market their music and performances to a more secular part of society. As such, music came to be viewed as a secular source of entertainment, evolving with the tastes of the public. As society grew to become more and more secular, so did music.

The industrial revolution of the 19th Century also greatly affected the music industry, shifting its focus from live performances to the exploitation of sheet music. While the printing press was invented in the 16th Century, the technological improvements of the steam powered press and the rotary printing press made it much faster and cheaper to print. Moreover, the industrial revolution created a middle class of society, which provided a wider consumer base for the exploitation of music. The industrial revolution also made it much cheaper to manufacture pianos, which lowered the price so that more people could purchase pianos. Because of this musicians could truly take advantage of the benefits of the printing press because not only did more people have the means to buy sheet music, but they have the ability to play the notes written on the sheet music at their homes. This lead to the proliferation of parlor music in 19th Century society.

Towards the end of this period of industrial growth, the Pianola was invented. The Pianola is a player piano that mechanically plays songs, thereby eliminating the need for any person to actually render the service of playing the music (this is where mechanical royalties entered the mix). Composers were thus given a much larger consumer base because people no longer needed to know how to play the notes on the sheet music. Rather, the notes would be played for them mechanically through the pianola. This caused for the sweeping rise of the sheet music industry, culminating in its dominance of the 19th Century music industry. This is the point where music fully became a product and no longer a service; the majority of money to be made was now in the sale sheet music, and not in the employment of the artist’s services. However, this was only the beginning of the productization that would dominate the business models of the music industry for the next 150 years.

In the late 19th Century, the advent of the phonogram launched the “record” industry and concluded the dominance of the sheet music industry. The gramophone was invented in 1887 and enabled people to listen to a sound recording of a performance without having to be at the performance. This was far superior to the player piano because it embodied a musician’s actual performance, instead of mechanically reproducing the notes written on sheet music through one single piano. An audience could hear an entire orchestra play a composition in exactly the way it was intended to be heard. The fact that the gramophone was cheaper to purchase than a player piano (and took up much less space) also contributed to its popularity.

The popularity of the gramophone became fully realized with the boom of radio in the 1920s. Radio became the primary source of entertainment in society, and as such, it became the primary marketing tool for the selling of records. Via the radio, a listener could constantly be exposed to new music that could be purchased for the gramophone. Musicians could now, for the first time, market to the general public, as since most Americans listened to the same radio stations. Phonograph recordings completely replaced sheet music as the primary source of revenue for musicians and forever changed the concept of music from a dynamic and interactive entertainment experience to a fixed product.

The original phonographic cylinder was soon replaced by a succession of new mediums, namely vinyl records, beta tapes, cassette tapes, and finally compact discs. In the 20th Century, music has become synonymous with the medium in which it is delivered. As technology improved, the recordings grew in quality and the devices needed to play these recordings lowered in price. As such, the notion of music as a product was easily spread throughout the world, and large profits were earned by the greedy labels.

In the 1980s the industry began making a transition from analog technology to digital, beginning with compact discs and culminating with digital formats distributed online. Digital technology has now been perfected and much like the gramophone did, it has completely revolutionized music creation and distribution. Although the digitalization of the industry has caused ramped piracy and copyright infringement, the Internet and the digital form is an enormous source of revenue and an extremely powerful marketing and distribution tool. In the last few years, digital sales have continued to rise, while CD sales have continued to plummet.

Many argue that the digitalization of the music industry, the latest trend in a long history of industry changes, has caused the retransformation of music from a product back into music as an entertainment service, much like it was before sheet music. The digital form has enabled music not to be tied to the media it is played on, and by separating the music from the product, it can be argued that music now exists as content, or rather a service.

So what do you think? What will the music industry look like in the next 10 years? How about in the next 50?

A Tribute to Gay Musicians

published
on June 17, 2008
by
Sandra
in culture and music
. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

In light of all the celebrations happening today in San Francisco on the first full day of legal same sex marriages in California, I thought I’d take a moment to acknowledge some of the gay musicians that have made a mark on the musical landscape.

Music certainly isn’t the only thing evolving these days. I feel so fortunate to live in a progressive environment like the bay area, where conventions are challenged, change is embraced, and activism is the norm. Gay, straight, bisexual, white, black, brown, yellow, tall, short, fat, thin…we are all just people after all.

One of the pillars of anthropology that has stuck with me since college is the notion of “becoming familiar with the unfamiliar and becoming unfamiliar with the familiar.” In other words, before you go judging what you don’t understand because you think it’s different or strange, try to understand it. And conversely, it’s immensely insightful to view the things you are comfortable with from an outside perspective and realize that what you consider normal might seem quite abnormal to another person.

The traits we share are what make us human. But the traits we don’t share are what make us unique. And interesting! So, let’s celebrate our differences, shall we?

I think most people would acknowledge that there are a lot of gay* musicians out there. I could only think of the most obvious ones off the top of my head, so I did a little digging around and compiled this list:

*I’m including artists who are either gay OR bisexual to the best of my knowledge in this list, but please feel free to correct me if you find anything inaccurate!

Ani DiFranco

Boy George

Erasure‘s Andy Bell

Dusty Springfield

Elton John

Eva Dahlgren

Freddie Mercury

George Michael

Indigo Girls

Janis Joplin

K.D. Lang

Lance Bass

Le Tigre‘s JD Samson

Melissa Etheridge

Melissa Ferrick

Rufus Wainwright

Sinead O’Connor

half of Sleater-Kinney

Tegan and Sara

Tracy Chapman

most of the Village People

And there you have it! Although the road ahead is clearly a bumpy one for same sex marriage, the recent events are groundbreaking and life-changing and I, for one, am very proud of California for being in the forefront of the movement. Whether you agree or disagree with what is going on in gay rights right now, I think most of us can agree that music as we know it would not be the same without the artists mentioned above.

And thus, I salute them.

Immortal Technique Interview, Part 1

published
on June 16, 2008
by
ACtual
in genres, interview, music, and music business
. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Immortal Technique has been on the scene, steadily gaining in influence and word of mouth for several years now. His first two albums, Revolutionary Vol. 1 and Revolutionary Vol. 2 redefined what rap music could be by not just mentioning public and political issues, but by intelligently, eloquently and powerfully incorporating them into a coherent message meant to spur action in the listener.

On this blog, we’ve previously reviewed an Immortal Technique show, as well as given many readers a first glimpse of Tech’s highly anticipated new album with DJ Green Lantern, The 3rd World. Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Immortal Technique and ask him a few questions. Due to the length of the conversation, and in preparation for the June 24th release of The 3rd World, I’ll be posting this interview in 3 parts, because how else can you tackle posting an interview where you talk about everything from writing rap lyrics to local politics in over 9 pages? Check back later this week for parts 2 and 3 of the interview with Immortal Technique.

AC: I want to start first by talking about your music in general, then I want to talk about The 3rd World release and the recording industry specifically, and then I’m going to ask you a few questions about your ideologies, political philosophies and views on some of the current global issues.

One of the strongest things about your music is that you remain independent, and you’re honest and unfiltered. On your first two albums, you incorporated a wide variety of styles from songs like “Caught in the Hustle,” which has a very South American sound to “Freedom of Speech” that borrows from Pinocchio. You also routinely include lyrics in Spanish. On The 3rd World track that I’ve heard, “Golpe de Estado,” has Spanish lyrics over a Godfather song. What’s your process in terms of writing your lyrics, and finding the music for them when it comes to your Peruvian birth, Harlem upbringing, and subsequent global experiences?

IT: I think that all of these things bring themselves together in a crux of cultural diversity. I’m from New York City, which is very different from the rest of America I must say. Anyone who is reading this who is in New York, or anyone who is reading this from a place in San Francisco or a place in LA, they have to realize that these large cities are very different than what the rest of America looks like.

Due to the fact that we have so much influence from other places that even Hip-Hop itself comes from the fact that Kool Herc brought all these records back from Jamaica and started spinning different things, and the African drum influence comes from so many different cultures and we have so many different people to thank for the advancement of this type of music. And I think that that being the case, it’s just another example of diversity for me about the music that I make.

AC: In your online postings and your blogs and song lyrics, you have a vast knowledge of social, economic and political issues and you cover a lot of topics almost all at once. Then at other times, the battle aspect of your rapping background comes out more. When you’re writing your lyrics, how do you approach dissecting a topic that you want to talk about and forming the structure of the message that you’re trying to get out?

IT: It really depends. There are some songs that have taken me, for example, two or three years to write. Something like “Dance with the Devil.” Then there’s a song like “Bin Laden” that took me one night to write. I wrote “Point of No Return” in a week, I wrote “Caught in the Hustle” in an afternoon. So I think that it just depends on how inspired I am. And not just how inspired I am by a track or if one takes longer to write, it doesn’t mean I’m less inspired by the subject matter or by the effect it’s had on my life, but more in how I’m inspired about conveying that message. Because something may be a little more delicate in terms of the way I want to analyze it in my mind, say, listen, this is surgical precision that I need in order to get this subject across because it deals with something so serious. Not that stuff that I write very quickly doesn’t deal with something serious, but maybe it’s a more natural flow and it’s more like, alright, I just feel this right now, so worse comes to worse, I come and edit the lyrics later. Sometimes I edit them, sometimes I don’t. So it depends a lot on the conceptuality of the record, that’s usually what it starts with.

In the past, when I was in prison, I just wrote lyrics that were based on what I felt and what I was seeing around me and what I was seeing going on in the world even though I wasn’t there, and how I felt about that. And how I felt about being a slave. The reality about me being released and saying to myself, “Hey, I’m actually free,” and all the different levels of freedom I felt. Because when I was incarcerated, I felt like I was trapped. Then, when the CO’s threw me in the hole and 23/1 where I’m in a restricted housing unit and I only get to leave my cell for half an hour a day, you know then I think I’m even more trapped. I get out of that and think I’m free, then I get out of prison and I think I’m free but I’m still on parole, then I get off parole and think I’m free, but I still can’t get a regular paying job because of my criminal record, and I can’t get into Canada because they won’t let me in there because of my criminal record.

So there are lots of degrees to the way I perceive things, and I guess the change in my life and the way that I conduct myself, and my maturing process, not just my voice getting a little deeper and raspier because of the 100-150 shows I do a year, but all these factors coupled with the evolution of my flow and how I decided to make music has definitely changed the way I do songs now. Whereas in the past, I might have wrote verses first and then found a beat, now it’s more about constructing a concept, then maybe getting a hook together, and then structuring lyrics that really cement the subject matter into one perfect unison.

AC: It’s one thing to be on an independent label, and then it’s another thing, like you, to have complete control over your lyrics, your music and your message. Could you talk a bit about the beginning to end process that you have to personally go through to create an album where everything on it is yours?

IT: (long sigh) Ya, that’s the process. That’s the process right there. Work, work, work. Like you just said, you summed it up, I have to do pretty much everything myself. I’m learning to delegate responsibility a lot more, but most of it still falls on my shoulders. And while I have people that help me out like the people at Viper Records, and people that help with the visuals, and then I have people who are constantly trying to come in and contribute whatever they can, I appreciate all of that. I don’t ever look down on anybody just based upon what their particular position is, because I started out not being very well known, just selling my records around the hood, and then when I was finally able to expand my fan base, I never ignored the people that originally bought my records. I never changed my style up to suit other people and make them feel better about themselves. I still wanted us to be able to talk about the problems that we have, but not just in a complaining manner, but also how to fix them, how to take personal responsibility for some of our issues, or I should say for all of our issues, because we’re the only ones who are going to fix them, not somebody else.

It’s definitely an incredibly huge process from the conceptualizing of all the records like I just said, to writing all the lyrics, cause don’t nobody else write music for me. Sometimes I bring samples to people because I want to use these specific samples, or I’ll come into the studio with a melody in my head and be like, “Can we play this out,” and people will say alright. When I have to meet up with other MCs, or I have to get to someone else’s studio, I’m driving up there myself. A lot of do it yourself stuff, of course, that’s why I get the lion’s share of the paper.

AC: That provides a perfect segway, as the next couple questions I wanted to ask are dealing specifically with The 3rd World. This album has been highly anticipated and the collaboration with DJ Green Lantern is kind of a new direction for you. How did the idea for this collaboration come about?

IT: Well, it’s a new direction in the fact that I’m doing an album with him, but I’ve done plenty of songs with him in the past. I did the “Bin Laden” remix and the original “Bin Laden” back in 2004, and I did the “Impeach the President” in 2006, and I just recently was featured on the Grand Theft Auto 4 soundtrack that he was on. So I’ve always worked with Green Lantern, it’s just that I had originally come to him telling him I wanted to do a mixtape, and he had come to me telling me, “I don’t want to do a mixtape, I want to do an album, I want to have an album in stores,” and I was like, “Alright, we’ll make that happen.” And he was telling me, “Whatever I need to do to help you with that, let me get you some instrumentals,” so he gave me some instrumentals, and we basically started out doing stuff for The Middle Passage and Revolutionary Vol. 3, but eventually, it became such an overwhelming display of music. Not that it didn’t match the conceptuality of The Middle Passage, although some of the songs didn’t, it was more of the fact that it was its own project as soon as I stepped back from it. I was like, “Wow, I have like 19 songs here. What the fuck? I’m sitting here with 20 songs, I’m sitting here with 25 songs.”

Some of these are definitely for The Middle Passage, some of these, like the song “The 3rd World” talks about the correlation between poverty here in America and police corruption here in America, and those same issues being mirrored in the Third world. To me, it was incredibly important to make those subjects known, especially now since we’re going into a different political climate. It’s important not to lose sight of that, because I feel like certain demographics of people in this country benefit from their relationship with the places they come from, and why shouldn’t Black and Latino people have the same? Why shouldn’t we be able to express ourselves on a national platform? I think the fact that Latino people have allowed immigrants to be demonized so much, that’s not all on the White media, that’s on us, because we’re living with that, it shows us how weak and pathetic our community leaders are in the face of all this stuff, because they put up the most minimal struggle. I really think that there has been a complete under representation of the struggle against this. One march on May Day is the culmination of all this? It’s an ongoing fight that’s never going to end, and yet we’re not unified about this, and that’s why they’re capable of demonizing us and vilifying us, and I believe it’s a disgrace to our people to allow something like that. So it’s a personal responsibility of our people to get it together.

Follow this link to part 2 of this interview where Tech talks more about The 3rd World, the music industry and global politics.

WTF is Music Publishing?

published
on June 13, 2008
by
Alan Khalfin
in music, music business, and music law
. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

As a law student who geeked out on Copyright law, the single most frequent question I’m asked is: “Dude, what the hell is music publishing?” This is a very loaded question that triggers a discussion about music Copyright law and the various royalties that stem from each music Copyright.

Copyright law divides the musical process into two parts: (1) the writing of the song and (2) the recording the song. This is a distinction most DIY cats don’t make because they’re doing both! But, in the “traditional” (and rapidly fading) music industry, the songwriters wrote the songs and the recording artists recorded and performed the songs (except for the singer/songwriters who did both). Most likely, you’ve never heard of the songwriters, but are overly familiar with the recording artists.

There are thus two copyrights that apply to music (both of which come with “exclusive rights“):

1. Copyright for the Song (form PA): This covers the underlying musical composition of the song (music and lyrics) and belongs to the songwriters/music publishers. It covers the writing of the song itself, as opposed to a recording of the song.

2. Copyright for the Recording of the Song (form SR). This covers the audio recording that is made of a song. It covers the actual recording of a particular composition, and belongs to recording artists/record labels.

So, music publishing is the business of creating/administering/monetizing the copyrights for the song. Record labels, on the other hand, do the same for the sound recordings (the “Masters”). While a song is only “written” once (and can only be copyrighted once), many different sound recordings can be made of the same song (and each recording would have its own sound recording copyright). Once a first recording (“first use”) is made of the song, anybody else can then “cover” the song based on the statutory royalty.

Note, I said “cover” and not “sample”. When you’re covering something you need permission from the songwriter, and not from the recording artist who recorded the famous version of the song. In the interest of creative growth, copyright law requires that the songwriters grant you permission , via a compulsory statutory royalty. If you’re covering something, you might be able to get the license here.

So, why should musicians care about this? For a moment, lets put aside the ongoing debate of where musicians earn most of their money. At least some of the money earned actually comes from the purchase or use (licensing) of the music. In an age where a successful musician must aggregate as many sources of revenue as possible (the long tail of music revenue, anyone?), musicians should be aware of the specific royalty chains that attach to each copyright.

From each of the two copyrights, a specific royalty chain ensues. Thus, there are royalties owed to the writers (the publishing side) and separate royalties owed to the recording artists (the Master side).

On the publishing/writer’s side:

1. Mechanical Royalties: Due from sale of recordings of the song through MP3s, CDs, LPs, etc. The current statutory rate is 9.1 cents or 1.75 cents per minute of playing time (whichever is greater).

2. Synchronization Licensing Fees: Due when a piece of music is “synced” or matched with a movie, tv show, commercial, video game, etc. These fees also apply to online audio-visual production.

3. Public Performance Royalties (via ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC): When a song is played/performed/streamed/broadcast publicly (on the radio, internet, on TV, etc), royalties are owed for this use. Performances are generally broken down into feature performances and background music. If there is a sync license deal, additional royalties are owed for the broadcast of the works the music is used in.

On the label/recording artist’s side (excluding tours/merchandise):

1. Money from the “exploitation” (sale) of the Masters in various formats (MP3, CD, LP, etc). For this, mechanical royalties are due on the publishing side.

2. Master Use Licensing: A sync license only covers the license for the composition of the song, and a separate license needs to be obtained for the use of the masters.

3. Digital Performance (via Sound Exchange): There is a limited public performance right in sound recordings when performed by digital transmission (generally, there is are no public performance rights in sound recordings). For most digital performances, there is a compulsory statutory license, but for some a case-by-case license fee is negotiated.

So, if you want to make as much money as you can off your music, you gotta mix and match your revenue streams. A general understanding of both publishing and sound recording law is thus pretty darn helpful!

A good reference for the issues covered in this post is, Music, Money, and Success by Jeffrey and Todd Brabec. Please note that this post attempts to provide an overview of music law, but by no means covers all the issues that arise. Please don’t take this as legal advice!