I have no idea what’s been going on with the “music industry” or music marketing lately. And I missed CMJ in NYC entirely. 

Good luck to everyone out there playing and singing and writing. I did score a beautiful electric piano for a fraction of its cost recently, so I have a new compositional tool. 

This site has been quiet for the past several weeks, as I’ve been busy launching a new ecommerce site for One Pearl. One Pearl sells beautiful pearl and semiprecious stone jewelry, and gives away most of their profits to fund organizations that benefit children. They do great work and I’m proud to be part of it. So put down your guitars momentarily and surf the site.

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Read below to find out…

We’ve been having a very interesting and informative dialog in the comments section regarding re-title publishing.

Re-title publishing is when a company re-registers your songs under a different name with a performing rights organization (ASCAP, BMI, etc), so they can license your music and collect a percentage of the publishing royalties, and track these royalties separately from any other licenses you may have given out for these particular songs.

Check out the comments section of a previous post on Re-Title Publishing, where you can read the opinions of someone who claims to own a re-title music publishing company. He argues that re-titling is a decent option for bands that don’t have endless hours of time to spend promoting their songs to online music libraries and music supervisors. His particular company seems to promote their catalog actively, spending money to create promo CDs, edit tracks, etc., which you certainly aren’t going to get from a fully-automated web service.

It’s an option.

Our Mystery Man Unveiled

Another reader likens choosing between online music licensing companies to a Cornelian Dilemma.

This man is Pierre Corneille. According to Wikipedia: “The Cornelian dilemma is named after French dramatist Pierre Corneille, in whose play Le Cid (1636) the protagonist, Rodrigue, is torn between two desires—that of keeping his girlfriend Chimène’s love and that of avenging his father, who has been wronged by Chimène’s father. Rodrigue can either seek revenge and lose the love of his beloved, or renounce revenge and lose his honour.”

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When you/I sign a contract with e.g. Pump Audio, does this “re-title publishing” come automatically with this deal or do they send some other deal to sign?

Does this “re-title publishing” end at the same time after the year or so as the normal contract ends, and what happens with the publishing deal info they’ve made with e.g. ASCAP?

My response was:

“I am not a lawyer, but the way I interpret the Pump Audio deal is that the re-title publishing is included automatically in their contract. They do not explicitly elaborate on it, which is no doubt intentional.
 

The publishing registration with the performing rights organization (ASCAP) is indefinite, because publishing royalties are generated not from the sale of a license but from the use of the music in a public context. By registering your songs under different titles, they are staking a claim to a percentage of future earnings that may occur if your music is used down the road by those who purchased the licenses. Most other organizations only take a piece of the initial license, in which case you receive all the publishing royalties.”

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I’ve been using Google’s new web browser Chrome since it came out, and it blows the doors off all previous browsers. The single best feature is that Chrome combines the address bar and search bar into one. This means I can type search terms or a URL in the same box, which has turned into a nice time saver.

I still use Firefox for FTP, but whenever I open it I’m annoyed by the now old-fashioned search box.

So check it out. Only available for Vista/XP so far…

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Other sites are reporting on these goings-on much more than I care to, so if you’re interested, check out Hypebot’s by-the-minute MySpace reporting for coverage of the MySpace Music negotiations and the hubbub surrounding indie labels and their fight for a take of the profits.

For some reviews and discussion of the ad service, you can check out:

Shoemoney

or

CDFNetworks

Ads can only link to MySpace profiles, so that pretty much makes me not interested.

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Below is a table that compares several basic features of each service examined so far…

To help you understand it, here are a few definitions:

Licensing Split: When someone buys a license to your music, they pay an upfront fee to the middleman service. The split determines how this money is divided between you and the middleman.

Back-End Publishing: Another source of income from licensing are the royalties generated when your music is used in certain situations, such as on TV or in a movie. These are generated every time your music is “performed”. In most cases, you the artist will receive 100% of the back-end publishing, because you probably don’t have a separate publisher. But in the case of Pump Audio, they re-register your songs with ASCAP, BMI, etc. under new names so that they can “administer” the royalties “more effectively”, and gain access to 50% of your publishing royalties. Sketchy.

See here for an explanation of this practice, known as Re-Title Publishing.

If you are interested in having us review your service, let me know: brian@themusicsnob.com
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In related news, Rumblefish put a post on their blog about our two part Rumblefish article…

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There’s an article at Wired about this mis-sent email and the idiotic attempts by its author to have his good deeds de-publicized. Here’s one of his winning defenses of selling product placements in songs:

“We are just financially taking care of the people that should be taken care of…If an artist like Sheryl Crow has the same target audience as XZY brand, we feel it’s nothing but a strong and strategic way to pinpoint a market.”

I was thinking of starting a non-profit recently to “take care of” Sheryl Crow, but I’m glad a for-profit got to it first and is looking out for her. She seems to really be suffering.

That said, I also disagree with the Anti-Advertising people, who seem to advocate a disabling “integrity” that would shame every artist into giving away his last pieces of property and living under a tree in a public park:

“Unfortunately, it does seem that some truly independent artists actually DO need the money provided by a momentary advertising fix.”

So they’re saying that some people, even though they have no corporate sources of income, may actually need money to survive like the rest of us? Who could imagine?! 

Get off your high horse. And take a writing class: their mission statement does everything but lay out a mission, getting lost in the satisfaction of using words that obscure and make uninteresting any actual point they may have.

But that’s just me, a broke independent musician, bitter that Coca-Cola hasn’t called yet asking me to write a song about Diet Sprite.

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To subvert the subversion, I’ve decided to place this icon above my Google ads:

Maybe if they institute a pay-per-click program I can offset the loss of giving my music away for free.

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Soon we will forge ahead with further talk of music licensing opportunities and other aspects of music marketing. Part of my quiet has been accepting that the best way to get heard these days is to give away your music for free. It took a while, but I’m convinced of this from my rampant surveys of music marketing blogs and the unsatisfactory returns on the time I’ve put into trying to sell my music.

My recent release, Bbelief, was a monumental effort for me in terms of time, passion, and money, and the results are my best musical creation thus far. Letting go of it and just putting it out there for free has been a psychological blow, as I think it’s probably the thing of most “value” that I’ve contributed to society.

Click here to download my 4-song EP

The “industry” discusses music as just another form of brand marketing these days, with the idea being, don’t worry about giving it away for free, because that’s how you get people interested in buying merchandise and concert tickets from you. Sounds like I better leave the woodshed and go on tour!

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