Musician’s Notebook

Nancy Prager, a copyright lawyer and writer whose articles I am a frequent reader of, has had some great commentary on the Radiohead “controversy” in the past couple of weeks (as well as the emerging “controversy” regarding Reznor and Saul Williams).

Prager’s conclusion on the whole thing:

“While In Rainbows may be a musical work for the ages, it wouldbe inappropriate to use Radiohead as the poster child of bands pursuingalternative paths if its journey leads them back to the major labels.”

I believe her to be correct. Free music downloads are a friggin’ great way for musicians to start building an audience. I’ve done it myself for most of this year. By the time I’d published the third tuneback, I was building buzz and had a few major publications, such as the Sydney Morning Herald, interviewing me and even releasing my songs on their site.

That’s not bad growth for three hours work (the tuneback concept imposes a rule of one hour spent writing and recording a song).

But building a career? You can’t do that by releasing free music forever, and in an age where - as Nancy says - some don’t even want to pay $1 to obtain the album and go over to the file sharing sites, you might want to wait until the ass-end of your career before you start giving fans entire albums for free.

Radiohead can afford to do this. They are sitting on more money than George W. Bush is sitting on stupidity. But if you are reading that, chances are you’re not sitting on that much cash. If you are, my email address can be found in the right sidebar (I have a bad case of starving artist syndrome). If you don’t charge for independently released albums you won’t be able to make any income from your songs. On the other hand, the tuneback is a minimal time and effort investment for building audience. There’s a balance when it comes to freebies.

The scary part is that Radiohead and Saul Williams are setting a dangerous precedent. Pubs already pay insulting rates to bands because they know they can get a cover band in for free. The problem of piracy has begun to plague album sales in the same way. This can only make it worse.

Or maybe, NDK was right when he proposed that Radiohead were really asking their fans: given the opportunity to steal from us, will you?

Tags: radiohead, in rainbows, saul williams, trent reznor, free music

Artists tend to focus on copyright as the be-all and end-all for the protection of their work and careers. While copyright is the most essential thing to know in-depth, there is something that is quite important that falls under the umbrella of intellectual property law: trademarking.

You can spend years building up a brand and reputation to support your name or your band’s name. If you’ve done that, it really doesn’t matter how many songs you write or how good you are - the name is the thing that sells, that piques interest in the ears of potential customers and potential investors, and therefore protecting that name is paramount to protecting your career. You do this by trademarking.

If you don’t trademark it yourself, you may end up with the same problem Prince had - and for many artists, it has meant the end of a career.

You can find out more on trademarking from the WIPO.

A few days ago we posted our contest regarding the five copyrights. Today, for the benefit of all, we’re publishing the answer to the question. Almost no musicians understand intellectual property law, but it’s the bread and butter of a musical career.

What’s more important than the songs themselves? The copyrights attached to them!

And here are the five exclusive copyrights of the creator/copyright holder:

1. To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
2. To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
3. To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
4. To publicly perform the work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
5. To publicly display the work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.

Learn them by heart. If you refuse, prepare for failure. Simple as that.

A week ago, I conducted a brief survey in a room full of musicians: what are the five copyrights?

Mind you, these aren’t just musicians. These are students of a university degree that is supposed to teach more about studio engineering, production, and the business of art and entertainment than theory and technical proficiency with an instrument.

I got blank stares. I wasn’t surprised, but it is sad to see that musicians don’t really understand something that is more important than anything else to their career. I’ve known musicians who sucked, but knew their copyrights well and exploited them to forge a career.

Only once you know the rules, can you break them, they say. And only when you know the copyrights, can you benefit from them. Your mission: find out what the five copyrights are. If you’re the first person to tell me what they are in the comments, you’ll get one free constructive critique of a set of lyrics.

Research away!