Sunday, June 25, 2006
Confusion
I'm totally confused about putting music online. On one hand, there is a lot to be said to just putting stuff out there. Webspace is cheap and up- and download times are brief, so it all should be pretty easy. A lot of my colleagues are going the MySpace.com route, which I've just learned is part of an evil empire. On the other hand, my rights organization (GEMA, the German equivalent of ASCAP or BMI) wants to make me pay a license fee upfront if I want to put my own music online, which strikes me as circuitous and perhaps a real loss of my own rights, rather than protection. I do appreciate the fact that GEMA does a fair job of collecting fees for physical recordings, concerts and broadcasts, and I want musicians to be able to earn a fair income from any innovative technologies for reproduction and transfer, but I don't see even the outlines of a workable plan for doing this yet. I could wax a little rhapsodic legalese over the brewing conflict between 19th and 21st century conceptions of intellectual property rights, but the issue for me is a practical and immediate one. At the moment, I'm only putting scores, occasional works and juvenalia online, things not registered with GEMA, and will wait and see about the rest. But I'm totally open to other suggestions.
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6 comments:
You're losing your dialect, dude. Shouldn't it be: "But I'm like totally open to other suggestions."?
Righteous camper.
The bit about GEMA asking license fee from you for your own work is absolutely bizarre. As far as I know, you can change anything you want in your piece, give it away on the street corner, or burn it with nobody being able to prevent it. Provided you were either completely responsible for the composition, performance and recording (or if not had obtained everybody else's permission), how would offering a file from a site be any different?
The question of receving fair income is valid, but what exactly would "fair" be? And is it all measured purely in money? There's also the risk that while you're waiting for some "fair income" from all your work, you end up growing old, poor and dead before then, since nobody every really had a chance to hear much of your music anyway.
GEMA is not being bizarre but consistant. When I signed up with GEMA we agreed that GEMA would collect all my non-Grand Rights licences (concerts, recordings, broadcasts). GEMA, in turn is able to go to record companies, presenters, and radio stations, and offer a blanket licence for all the music they use, and then divy it up among their members. And GEMA payments for "serious" music have been excellent. The problem now with putting my own music online (or producing my own cd) is that I have become a presenter as well as a creator and GEMA has no mechanism for making a distinction upfront for producers that are producing their own work. Instead, they ask for the standard license upfront and I get the artist fees back. With cds, I always got a bit back more than I paid in upfront, plus any broacast fees, but with web broadcasting, I just can't recognize a mechanism in place at the moment for the same return on my upfront license.
Income has to be talked about in terms of money. My personal satisfaction with my own pieces is not measured by the number of people listening to it, but by my own relationship to the piece, and I happily subsidize this entirely on my own. But when time and effort is spent on making a work public -- copying parts, organizing, rehearsing, promoting, recording -- that carries real costs that have to be covered by real money from someplace. Since I am not independently wealthy, I'm obliged to insist that the audience find some mechanism to compensate for the work that they use. (The alternative to a fair licensing system will be to limit expensive productions of music to either those who can subsidize it themselves or those who are already on some institutional paycheck, clearly a step back into a world of patronage I'd rather not live in).
Well, I find that a -excuse the french- backassward way of "helping" composers collect for their work. It almost sounds like outright theivery. Wouldn't it be a better idea to prclude the involvement of your agent, and post your work (seriously!) through something like garageband.com, where at least you could get some return for folks downoloading it? I have quite a few works I wrote back in the 90's myself, and have not (yet) posted any of that work online, due to
dificulties people may enocounter such as those you suggest. But something like that IS a valid option for me.
I really hate the idea of pay to play, esp when- as all of us who "dabble" in "seriously composed" music well know- the trip from hand & pen to performance could take a lifetime (or as the writer above suggests, even longer.)
Too bad you can't post examples of your stuff...I looked at your website...and wanted to hear something!!
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