I have this faint knowledge of artists making money whenever their songs get played in public, but I don't know exactly how it works....
Is it a fixed fee??? Do only the people who were accredited with the songwriting in the first place get the money, but not the rest of the band??? So, for example, Keith's sitting on the toilet with the Sunday paper at 10am, and some radiostation plays Brown Sugar in Tokyo, and PLINNNNG, he's 50 pence richer????
And how about coverbands, then????
Did Flip The Switch have to pay a fee every time they played a song to an audience???? Or is it a general yearly fee??
(So do the Stones make money on that, too???? Blimey, the Empire doesn't need to strike back, it's bloody everywhere!!!...)
And if someone played a song by Bob Dylan exactly the way he does, melody utterly unrecognizable to 95% of his concert audience, words mumbled unintelligibly, then would they get away with NOT paying royalties at all????
And how does it work when people steal certain elements from someone else's song??? There's a girl whose name I don't know who has a hit at the moment played nonstop on british radio, and it starts exactly like the first ten seconds of a Dylan hit (but I've just forgotten which one,sorry),You would actually swear on your own life it is Dylan, even my dog pointed the fact out to me while we were driving to work this morning...
WHEN EXACTLY is it plagiarism??? Is it a very grey field, and do these things get settled only by lawyers in a court ????

Thanks, everyone!

Royalties are split in a part for the composer and a part for the performer.
So if Keith is sitting on the toilet, he gets both parts for Brown Sugar.
At the same time, Mick Taylor gets only the performer's parts.
You get payed if you're registered as an artist with a auther's copyright association, I think every country has it's own. Somehow they seem to register when and where your songs are being played. The radio station pays a yearly fee for everything they play and they have to fill in lists of everything they play. I think the copyrights association makes selections of which songs have been played. It must be a hell of a job...
As for Dylan: if someone plays a song that sounds familiar, but isn't understandable because of the mumbling, you can be sure that it's a Dylan cover and so they know where the royalties should go ;-)
I don't know about the coverband-thing. Interesting question. Nor do I know about the "stealing" of a part of a song. But of course, Eminem pays royalties to Dido for "Stan" and the Stones named KD Lang a co-author for Anybody seen...

you can look there


[www.gema.de]


its a german page ,but its still availible in english

-----------------------------------------------------
Oh, give me the beat, boys, and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock and roll and drift away



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2005-07-01 18:04 by TeleK.

As a cover band drummer .....
We don't pay royalties to play a Stones song. boy wouldn't that be a nightmare..lol
However, if were to record a Stones song and sell CD's we would have to
pay a royalty.

Plagiarism is something that gets settled in court.
For instance that silly case of George Harrison ripping off My Sweet Lord
from He's so fine.

Hope this helps/

Marv Peck

Y'all remember that rubber legged boy

you might also try this one:
[entertainment.howstuffworks.com]

the one on music licensing is also enlightening:
[entertainment.howstuffworks.com]


"What do you want - what?!"
- Keith

Thanks a lot, boys!

Johanna

LoFL: i'm a she!
you're welcome. :E


"What do you want - what?!"
- Keith

Sorry, Sista, it's the perennial smell of testosterone of most threads that makes me forget there are other girls around....
:-)

Under new rules in the UK, you have to fill out a PRS form after playing. (At least for the more 'respectable' venues).

In this, you have to report what songs were played, the songwriters, the publisher, the length of the song you played etc.

You can imagine this is a nightmare. I wonder what would happen if I just said it was all my own material? There's no-one there to check, right?

Not a rule created by our beloved Eurowankers having to justify their overpaid existence, by any chance???? In a way, your rule at least warrants that the original artist receives the royalties he/she is rightly entitled to???.Or was there a perfectly functioning scheme in place before???
But in my line of work there is a new EU rule being currently made into law, and I will not only have to lay my healing hands onto animals, but also record every single drug I use and prescribe with a record of amount, batch number and expiry date on the animal's file. As if I didn't have to push enough paper around already. And my rule makes bugger all sense. We already keep such records for vaccinations, there it does make sense for cases where it turns out that the vaccine didn't produce the expected immune response and the animal gets the disease the vaccine was meant to protect it from. But for every bloody drug?????? They can stick their rule where the sun don't shine, as far as I'm concerned, and put me in front of a disciplinary comittee for good measure, but I ain't playing the game....Just say it's your own material and see what happens....And when does a variation from a song become exempt from royalty payments??? Could you not add a Shoobidoobidoo at the end and claim it's yours?

Another way to deal with braindead new rules, would be for loads of people (and I mean thousands and thousands) to actually fill in the forms and send them to the relevant authority at once and on the same day, they'd be so bogged under with paperwork that they would soon enough realise that this type of shit is unenforceable !!! It would just be a repetition of the mountain of fridges that by now ought to be higher than Mt. Everest lying around unrecycled in the UK ... ...

Someone somewhere will be making a packet out of it. And it isn't me.

Actually very simple:

1. Credits are divided by author and by performer. For record sales, both author and performer gets money (about 20% of total album sales for the author, 5% for the performer). For radio and TV play, only the author gets money. Everytime Brown Sugar is played in Barcelona, Richards gets about $0.10 on his account, and Bill Wyman gets nothing. TV and Radio stations keep big lists of the airplay, and the artists get a quartally cheque. By the way, Tokyo is in Japan, and Japan is one of the only countries that doesn't pay royalties to foreign artists.

2. If someone covers your song, you get full credits and thus full money. If someone steals have of your song, you get (maybe after court) full credits and full money. If you take a song, adjust a few lines, you either pay full credits to the original performer, or ask permission for writing credits, which in the case of the Stones is out of the question. A Jagger/Richards/Mathijs song called I can Get Satisfaction will never be issued...

3. If you perform a cover live, you either have to pay royalty direct (the bigger artists do that) or the owner of the joint does it for you. A pub owner pays a yearly sum for credits (includes the CD's he plays, includes the bands he's having), and this money goes to a big pile of money. Every artist can claim a certain amount of money from that pile, but then you have to prove it as an artist. So the Stones can say: o.k., there's 10 Stones cover bands in the Netherlands doing in total 250 gigs, so we get this and that amount of money from the pot.

The airplay on the radio is what earns the most. It once was calculated that Hey Jude by the Beatles is on the radio every moment of the day somewhere in this world, meaning about a million airplays a year. For any globally number one hit this number applies.

Mathijs

Simple, perhaps, but you gotta watch/hold onto your publishing.
That's where the nightmares start.
So all you songwriters out there, take note.

Well, that made it quite concise and clear, thanks, Mathijs.

But how come the Japanese are excluded from this regulation?
Do these musical royalty laws work like international "treaties" which the individual countries either accept and sign onto or not (like for example CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), or are these international "laws"???
And could Japan maybe be exempt because they have this total obsession for public karaoke, which I imagine really complicates matters??? And how does karaoke apply elsewhere???

BUMP - due to the recent question, seeing how old this one is, ha ha....

Reading this thread reminds you that purchasing the Northern Songs catalogue was a very astute move by Jacko and a dreadful mis-judgement by Macca (and Yoko).

And of course (as covered in IORR many times) how the Stones got ripped off when losing (or rather not managing to buy) the 1963/71 masters/publishing copyrights.

Well, I think that this question (thread) wasn't silly at all and I found the answers to it very interesting so thanks :-)

wow, I just realized - what happened to jostorm??

Quote
Lorenz
wow, I just realized - what happened to jostorm??

She still posts on Rocks Off.

Quote
Edith Grove

Quote
Lorenz
wow, I just realized - what happened to jostorm??

She still posts on Rocks Off.

Oh yes, I remember. I think bv blocked her or at least she was very unhapp with the rules...she was cool.

I didn't notice the date on the original thread.

At first I was thinking it was Ms. Jo Wood trying to figure out if Ronnie & his lawyers were trying to screw her over!

Bet theres lots of old r n r and blues guys that can tell ya how they're NOT supposed to work!