Who owns the rights? The existential threat for Artists in the world tommorrow.
Thats the biggest question that the industry is trying to solve, and as you’d expect its lots of people doing different things to address the proplem and answer that most basic question.
But before I rant on, first let’s look at music rights and how that works.
In every song, there are two rights. The Composition otherwise known as the Mechanical Right (that is who wrote the song) and the Performance Right (The Performer). There are are further rights in this to: The distribution right, derivative works, display, public performance, digital transmission and reproduction etc etc.
All of these rights are the essential “oils” for monetisation of music and more specifically…artists.
OK.
Thats a bit of a mouth full. It get’s more complicated when we ask the question Who owns the rights to the song or the recording, or the album, or the mash up, or the remix, or the demo, or the music video and becomes an even bigger moment when we want to know who owns it now, who owned it 10 years ago let alone in which territory and even worse, who SAYS they own the rights? Rights hijackers, those benevolent souls who help themselves to unclaimed rights. Sitting by their pools, furnishing their slick LA homes with the proceeds. Wankers.
You’d think this was all nicely controlled — but chaos reigns. The data is a mess. Its all over the shop and we wonder why Spotify didn't pay the right owner. Yes there are some services working to improve like the Open Music Initiative, but we’re still far off. Did you ever see the old cartoon The Twelve Tasks of Asterix — “The place that sends you mad”. Asterix simply needs a form completed, a simple administrative formality, it turns out that getting that done is a Herculean task.
So the quesiton of “Who owns the rights” is complicated enough with traditional media, but the complexity goes up by several orders of magnitude when you’re in the digital domain.. it might go 2¹⁰. Then comes Collaboration, which is essentially most hits today. It’s not uncommon for popular artist like Taylor Swift to have dozens of songwriters and even more collaborators, so how do you track and manage that?… The average number of collaborators on a single track these days is 4 or 5.. so thats a further order of 2¹⁰ to the power 5 (the numbers here are just to illustrate the point). Then theres the small guy, making wicked jams in his room. Not wanting to invoke the Nazarene, But Jesus, its probably easier, but where does he go from there. He could register with APRA and PPCA (OneMusic) and we all know how THAT’S going to work out don’t we.
So there are many people trying to solve this problem. But here’s the rub, the same mentality that drove publishers and what not to hold onto this stuff is the same issue thats going to arrive with the many prevailing approaches.
By approaches, I’m talking about the dozens of tech orgs trying to use a blockchain. This isnt fixing the problem. What they are really doing is cleaning data. Which in itself is a huge issue that needs to be addressed because the data is a mess and I fully consent to them doing this. But you’re ultimately going to run in to the “Spotify doesn't have it in their catalog but Apple Music does” kind of issue when it comes to repitoire. Because some will have alot of repetoire, some won't and there WILL be disparencies between whats actually in those repetoirs.
So it’s still going to be a ball-ache, its just going be a marginally less agrivating ball-ache, because now you’ll have to deal with all these different “chains” organisations. These “Chain” organisations are not going to do it for free, what they are really trying to do is replace the publisher — thats not entirely a bad thing, but their role is to provide the cleansed data layer. I know of four or five orgs that are playing in this place, claiming to be the answer. But ultimately, what they are providing is a form of version control and history. Distributed of course, but controlled by them. How are they getting their data? I’d suspect its the same “Look into my eyes, look into my eyes, not around my eyes, look in to my eyes — right you’re under” pitch that every tech company has thrown at rights holders since someone said “lets put near master digital versions of songs on a compact disc — At least its not vinyl.. what could go wrong?!”(evidently CD-ROMs, Song ripping tools, MP3’s and the internet!). For all their ambition, they will never get all the data for a track, because there is some data that is very deeply guarded. So rightly or wrongly, its about control.
Out of the frypan and into the fire.
So the question in the future wont be “Who owns the rights?” it will be “Who can tell me who owns the rights?”
That friends is the real problem.
The future is open. MP3’s worked because they are agnostic, low infrastructure and transportable. They will play on anything — pretty much. Remember DRM? That stopped you playing your music where you wanted. Thats the issue I’m trying to show here. Imagine if each media format was wrapped in DRM and you wanted to play on your one player.
The whole thing about DRM was that it was a closed ecosystem — “Our content on our approved players”. Thats the problem we’ll have in the future but it will be “Our data on our system” if we go down that path. We achieve nothing.
“There is as much art in taking direction as there is in giving it” — Robert “Mutt” Lange
Technology companies often believe that they can set the rules and “Y’all can cop it sweet!”. History shows that it happens too often. That statement from Mutt had a huge effect on me when he said it. As technology thinkers who are passionate about technology and music, we need to take the explicit instruction inferred by artists to us:
“Make sure I get paid fairly.”
At every one of our meetings, I pull up an empty chair. “Guys, I want you to imagine that sitting in this chair, right here, is your favourite Artist and they are involved in this meeting and we’re talking about their business”.
So in doing our art, we need to be really careful here. We’ve got a chance in the coming years to make a change. But we cant rush it and its not a case of if we get nine women we get a baby in one month. Its going to take time. Current chain providers are part of the solution and they are doing amazing work, but they are not the complete answer to “Who owns the rights” and while everyone deserves to make a quid, at the end of the day, all this stuff, these rights, they exist so everyone get’s paid who helps deliver it to the fans.
