The Music Business Buddy
A podcast that aims to educate and inspire music creators in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. A new episode is released each Wednesday and aims to offer clarity and insight into a range of subjects across the music industry, all through the lens of a music creator for the benefit of other music creators. The series includes soundbites and interviews with guests from all over the world together with commentary and clarity on a range of topics. The podcast is hosted by award winning music industry professional Jonny Amos.
Jonny Amos is a music producer with credits on a range of major and independent labels, a songwriter with chart success in Europe and Asia, a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business at BIMM University UK, director of The SongLab Ltd and the author of The Music Business for Music Creators.
www.jonnyamos.com
The Music Business Buddy
Episode 12: The Power of Owning Your Masters Rights
We also delve into the often-murky waters of business relationships between music producers and artists. Highlighting fair and transparent practices, we explore the pros and cons of charging a flat fee versus taking a share of copyright. Learn about the struggles bands face with streaming income and the essential nature of having clear agreements to avoid disputes. Discover the significance of "points" on record sales and how this practice has evolved. We look at the myriad benefits of artists owning their master rights and discuss alternative arrangements, such as partnering with label services companies. We also hear soundbites from Ryan Pinson of RML Studios who shares his insight. Don't miss out on these crucial insights that could help you navigate the business side of the music industry with confidence.
The Music Business Body. The Music Business Body. Hello everybody, welcome. You're listening to the Music Business Body with me, johnny Amos, podcasting out of Birmingham in England. I am the author of the Music Business for Music Creators, available in hardback and paperback and also ebook format, available in all major bookstores and online. Now I'm a music creator, a songwriter and a producer with various credits, and I'm also a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business. Wherever you are, whatever you do, please consider yourself welcome to this podcast and to a part of this community. I'm here to try and educate and inspire music creators from all over the world in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music.
Speaker 1:Okay, so today I'm talking about master rights. Now, master rights are the rights to the master recording right. So who owns the recording of a particular song? Now, it's often referred to as the sound recording copyright. Sound recording copyright or master rights of a master recording. It's the same thing, it's just different terms for the same thing. It means the same thing. So it relates to the intellectual property of a recorded song. Not the song, but the recording of that song. Are you still with me? Okay, good, so now I want to clarify something because I've come across numerous artists and producers that get confused about the correlation between master rights and mastering. So if anybody gets confused by this, I'm just going to kind of try and demystify it now by telling you that they're totally different things, right? So the master recording and the mastering are different things. So mastering relates to the process of rendering the audio content of a song's recording for commercial release. So a recording is finished and then it gets mastered. That's nothing to do with the ownership of master rights. It's a separate thing completely. Now I know most people will know that, but there's some people that don't, and when I was younger I didn't know that. So just if anybody's confused about that, be confused no more. They're totally different things, OK.
Speaker 1:So a master recording, what is it? It is the sonic identity of a recording of a song. So the master rights relate to generally to whoever owns the recording. Now the master rights are typically owned by whoever facilitated or financed the recording. So in a professional context, that will usually be a record company or perhaps an artist. But on a more grassroots level, the ownership of master rights is a bit more complex. It shouldn't be, but it sometimes is Now. The owner could perhaps be the artist, it could be a manager, it could be some kind of financier, it could be a producer or it could be a totally other entity. New master rights are created every time that there is a master recording of a song. Therefore, one song could have more than one master related to its identity.
Speaker 1:So if we take a song let's take I don't know, stand by me, right, one of the greatest songs ever in my view. Love that song. Now, if I were to sit here now and just get my guitar out and perform that song and record it into this microphone don't worry, I won't. But if I were to do that, then as soon as I finish that recording, I own the intellectual property to that recording because I'm sat here in a studio that I own right now. That doesn't mean I own the song.
Speaker 1:Lieber and Stoller are the writers and, I think, the publishers of that song. So that belongs to Lieber and Stoller. That's the rights to the song. But there are multiple versions of that song. Right, there's the Bennyny king version, there's the john lennon version, there's the florence and machine version. There's loads of different versions and every different version would have its own copyright. But that copyright of the recording relates to the master rights, not the song two rights to think about.
Speaker 1:You've got the rights of the song Well, that sits with music publishing. You've got the rights to the recording, which traditionally sits on the recorded music side, ie your record company. So if you're an independent music creator and you own both your song and the recording, you're in a great position. You're in a brilliant position because you own all of the rights. You've got a lot of bargaining power, right. Once you start to then offset or assign those rights to a music publisher for the song or to a record company for the recording, then in return you get money and time and expertise. And if you don't do that, then you own the rights to the song and to the recording. So the master rights relates to the ownership of the recording.
Speaker 1:So let's add a little bit of context here, right, let's just pick a case study that's been quite well publicized in recent years, which is the master rights ownership issue surrounding taylor swift's early albums, right, so okay. So here's the scenario taylor swift, she's 15 years old, she signs a six album deal with big machine records. She does those six studio albums. They get released they do very, very well and then fast forward a few years and in 2018, taylor Swift then signs with Republic Records. From 2018 onwards right Now the ownership of those first six albums that belong to Big Machine Records then get sold to a new owner. Taylor Swift is not happy about the new owner owning those recordings, so she kind of lost relinquished any kind of control as to what would happen with those recordings, because they didn't belong to her in the first place, right? So therefore, she didn't lose the rights to the songs, she lost the rights to the recordings, which means that she can just do new recordings, which is what she did.
Speaker 1:It's when we put it in context like that that we can start to understand why we hear so many cover versions used in adverts or in television or in films, because as soon as somebody records a song, whether they wrote it or not, they own the rights to that recording. Now let's take, for example, an emerging producer that wants to work with an emerging artist. It might be that they start working together, but they're not thinking about who's going to own what, and to have a discussion about that kind of feels a bit awkward. But it needn't and it shouldn't, because further down the line it creates complications, rather like how I talked about in Song Splits on the first episode of this podcast. It's really important to have some kind of discussion and put in writing what the deal is. So if an artist comes into a studio to work with a producer, it's important that both of those two entities have an ownership of the intellectual property of what's taking place, and that intellectual property splits into two forms the song or the recording, or the song and the recording. The confusion comes when those conversations don't take place or if all of a sudden, further down the line, something then happens with that recording and then people start saying well, you know, I just assumed we'd own it and you know there is an assumption there because there's a moral act. But then there's the legal act and if there's no paperwork to kind of back it up, then everyone's in a difficult spot. And all of that can be avoided by just kind of figuring out what the deal is before you start to work together.
Speaker 1:Now there's a few different aspects of a recording, isn't there? There's the actual, there's the performances of the recording, there's the people or person that is engineering the recording or producing. Then maybe there's somebody who's arranging or maybe they are the same person as the producer, and then there's maybe the person that also mixes it. Then there's also the person that maybe masters it. Now, that could perhaps be done all in-house by one person or one team, but what about if it isn't? What about if there is a recording that takes place? Let's say it's a band or a singer and they do some recording. They record part of a recording somewhere, maybe at home, and then they record other parts in a studio, and then it goes to somebody else for mixing.
Speaker 1:Well, that can be fraught with problems. It needn't be. But if there is no agreement in place as to who is being paid what or who owns what, then you're quite limited as to what you can then ultimately do with that recording. When it comes to distributing it, you'll have to say you know who produced this. Or when it comes to registering the recording, you would have to say who played on this or who engineered this. When it comes to licensing that recording into sync opportunities, you would then have to declare who owns what and what that looks like, and until all of those things are actually agreed, you can't really trade or do business with that recording. So it becomes redundant, and that's why so many recordings sadly sit in the redundant, dormant position where people don't know what to do with them because there's no agreements on who owns what.
Speaker 1:So let let's say, for example, an artist goes to a recording studio and works with a recording engineer or producer, they pay a fee and they leave. Do they own that recording? Well, many people would nod and say yes, and I would say yes as well. As somebody that comes to me and does that, I would most definitely say yes, but not everyone does. And this is where it gets a little bit confusing, because I had a situation just, for example, the other day, just last week, where an artist came to me and said right, I've paid this money to this producer and we're finished and he's mixed it and it sounds great. I'm really happy. But after I paid the fee, he then sent me a contract telling me that he owns three percent of the recording. Is that normal? You, it does happen, it can happen, uh, but really that should have been presented from the onset by the producer.
Speaker 1:It's situations like that that again take us back to those, the importance of those early conversations. You know that really should have been the producer there saying, right, yeah, this is my fee and I take 3% of the masters, okay, and then the artist can then say, okay, do I want to work with that person based on that? Yeah, they might do a great job creatively. But do I want to be in a position whereby a part of my masters is owned by somebody else? Like there's nothing wrong with that? We're only talking about 3%, but you know, that could be notable at some point in the future.
Speaker 1:Another thing that can trip up some artists when it comes to master rights ownership is if a song has been recorded in some kind of educational setting. Now, there are very often kind of small terms and conditions. When something is recorded on campus at, say, a school or a college or university that say something along the lines of any recordings take that take place here, 10 of it will be owned by the educational setting, which is really sneaky, isn't it? But anyway, now what I would say to that is what are the educational settings doing to actually regulate that? What are they doing to force that 10% onto the artist? Are they keeping track of all the recordings? Like I'm going to guess no in a lot of those cases. But that's neither here or there. What matters is that before you go in to go and do that recording at that educational setting, I know why you might want to go there because it's cheap or it's free or whatever but there might be a caveat that could catch you out there. So that's another thing to bear in mind. But there might be a caveat that could catch you out there. So that's another thing to bear in mind.
Speaker 1:Another complexity can come when working in a band or in a group of people, whereby there might be one or two or maybe three people that have written the song, but then the whole band is recording the song. Now if the whole band is kind of chipping in equally financially to split the cost of the recording, let's say five ways between five members, then really it should be the entire band that owns the recording, which again is a different intellectual property than the songwriting. So you might have three people that own the song and five people that own the recording. Okay, let me add a little bit of my own context here just for a minute, just to see if this helps. So so, as a producer myself, when I've had releases on major record companies, I have to very often agree on email or in contract, to the fact that I bypass the ownership or part ownership of any part of that recording and then, in turn, I get a fee for that. That means that none of that recording is no longer owned by me. It still sits, you know, on my hard drive or on my laptop as a group of stems or as a mix, but I've lost the legal right to that recording. I don't own it anymore. I can't just release my own version of it because I've been given a fee for that.
Speaker 1:Now let's contrast that against a different producer. I've just picked a producer at random, right, that I want to ask a question to about this subject, about how they handle this in their studio. So I purposely picked someone that I hear a lot of good things about, right? So it's a guy called Ryan Pinson from RML Studios in Wolverhampton in England and he does such a good job for so many artists, bands, singer-songwriters, people always sing his praises. His recordings are amazing, his mixing is amazing. But I thought to myself, what is his deal like? Does does he take a fee of? Does he just take a fee, or does he take points off the master, which we'll come back to in a bit.
Speaker 2:So I asked him about what his deal is when working with artists, and this is what he said usually what I do is I charge a flat fee and that's purely just so I know that I'm going to be able to cover my overheads and keep things ticking along at the studio. Uh, there have been times when I've reduced my fee and maybe suggested a share of the copyright just to help them, because I felt like it was worth investing a bit of extra time into that particular artist. But I think bands in general are struggling a lot these days that the streaming platforms aren't generating the right kind of income that the bands deserve.
Speaker 1:So for me to take a percentage of that it doesn't feel quite right okay, so a very kind and honest and transparent, noble way of doing business there from ryan. I then asked him if his approach ever has caused any difficulties for him, and this is what he said it's never really been an issue for me because I charge a flat fee.
Speaker 2:The way I see it is that if the band or whoever has come into the studio and they've paid me to work on their project, then that they own it, so all the files belong to them. There might be in instances that I've heard of where we've continued a project that start that might have been started off at another studio and the producers being funny about sending those files over. But you know, the way I see it is that if it's been paid for, then it belongs to whoever's paid for it.
Speaker 1:Ah yes, A very important point that Ryan has made there. This idea of kind of producers and engineers almost holding artists at ransom by, you know, withholding their stems, you know, all of that again can be really, really easily avoided by agreeing something in writing before you then work with that producer or production team by saying, you know, can we get the stems at the end of the project. Just an email back before we work together saying, yeah, no problem, legally you're covered. Then you know you can have those stems. Yeah, it might be difficult to get them out of people sometimes, but if they've agreed to it then they should have to do it and that's enforceable, ok, so what are points? Because this is a term that's been around for decades in the music industry. So points are percentage points on record sales. So it's something that producers sometimes expect when they produce a record. Now, again, this should be part of the negotiation process. But perhaps the producer is being paid a flat fee, just like what ryan was talking about there, or maybe even a day rate or an hourly rate, and on top of this the producer could ask for points from sales. Now, if this is the case, it's important to determine whether that even relates to the dealer price or the retail price, because point scales tend to vary, generally speaking, from 1% to 5%, but may increase if sales reach a specific threshold. Now, this should all be part of a negotiation, without doubt, and producer point requests are not always met. In fact, some could even argue that it's a practice of a bygone era for some. You know, many labels no longer negotiate on points and and only offer flat fees to producers, but nevertheless it's a consideration in the context of of master rights.
Speaker 1:Okay, so what about the benefits of actually owning master rights? You know, because, undeniably, the rights to a master recording are one of the most important forms of intellectual property in the music industry and today many artists choose to own their own masters rather than sign to a record company. And artists that own their own masters are entitled to trade freely with whichever entity they wish to do business with. Now, that can be especially lucrative when it comes to licensing the use of those recordings with brands or video game creators or ad agencies, film production companies, tv companies, etc. And this is all because of the upfront fees that go directly to the master rights owner, so that if that's the artist, then all those upfront fees go straight to the artist with no, so that if that's the artist, then all those upfront fees go straight to the artist with no cut off point for anybody else. Now this route relies on the artist being pretty self-motivated and connected to the right industry personnel to make that a viable option. But more and more and more people are doing it now and now. Another option here that artists have in this era is to partner with a label services company, which they effectively kind of hire to manage their release campaign, rather than relying on the services of a record company.
Speaker 1:Okay, so where does streaming royalties sit with all of this right? So 80 and 20 let's just put those two different numbers there. 20 relates to the songwriting and 80 relates to the recording. So the lion's share of streaming royalties goes to whoever owns the recording. Now, that's just streaming, right, and we know that there's not a huge amount of money in streaming unless you're in very, very, very high numbers. But there is an awful lot more to this subject than just the subject of streams, because songs or recordings of songs get used in so many different ways these days, and if you're managing your own rights, then that doesn't mean you don't have to work in partnership with another company. There's plenty of rights management organisations out there that will enable you to track usage whilst you still own your own rights, to be able to see where the recordings are being used and what you're getting back in compensation for them.
Speaker 1:Ok, so we've heard today about producers such as Ryan, such as myself and many others that would go okay. As a producer, we've been paid a fee. Therefore the artist paid us that fee and therefore the artist owns the recording. Now, it doesn't always have to be that way. Let's go back to that scenario of emerging music professionals that collaborate, let's say, a producer and an artist that work really, really well together. There's nothing wrong with no fees changing hands, nothing wrong with it whatsoever. What can be wrong is when there's no agreement in place because that artist and producer could go on to co-own those recordings, maybe co-own the songs as well. Again, a different agreement. The songs is with publishing, the recordings is with record companies or an artist's label services, for example. But there's nothing wrong with not exchanging money as long as it is known and it is clear as to who owns what, because then you can do business. Okay, that pretty much wraps up this episode.
Speaker 1:I hope it's been useful. Please feel free to reach out to me with questions anytime you like. I'm easily found. I just put my name into Google Johnny Amos J-O-N-N-Y-A-M-O-S, or go to my website, johnnyamoscom, and you can download. You can email me. Feel free to email me. It's always good to get feedback. If you've got ideas or things you want to hear on this podcast, or if this subject today has really captured your imagination, thought right, I need to do that. I need to use paperwork Then feel free to go to the music industry resources tab on my website, where you can download the necessary documents that you need for free by the way, there's no charge for it. So you can download song split sheets. You can download sound recording copyright split sheets. Use them. Use them as part of your practice. It will help you. Anyway. That's enough for me. I'll catch you next time. Thank you for listening, thank you for being a part of this community, and may the force be with you. Christmas party the Music Christmas Party.
