Wow I had no idea this was taking place. It reminds me a little of the fight hollywood screenwriters have fought to get equal billing and recognition. I always assumed that the writer got the most money!
Maybe in Christopher Nolan's case that may be true. Even in the rare case of an original script i doubt that the writers get any significant slice of the pie. It would be interesting to know more about how the film industry pays its contributors.
I don't remember all the details but as a long time listener to Scriptnotes (if the industry of screenwriting for Hollywood interests you highly recommended) it gets pretty complicated. First people get paid for the initial draft. Then they can get paid for rewrites (many contracts come with provisions to give the writer some number of drafts back and forth with the studio/director). Sometimes these can be negotiated into yet more drafts if things are close and the studio is happy with the writer.
More commonly, at some point a different writer is brought in to update it, sometimes heavy rewrites, sometimes just tweaks. Once it gets filmed, the writer's guild has a process of arbitration to determine who gets credit, based on roughly who is believed to have contributed the most original material. The person or persons who are considered the primary creators get residuals based on % of money made (actual money made not the Hollywood accounting bullshit).
Screenwriters have a good union and are paid pretty well for movies that get made. Not star money, and usually not director money, but more than just about any other roles. Their residuals can also be substantial for a successful show/movie.
They also have very prominent credits, second only to the director (notice it's the second to last in opening credits or second if it's closing credits).
Their biggest issue is all the unpaid work they get asked to do. They can do months and even years of work without any compensation with projects that aren't really moving forward.
Yeah, writers have been kinda screwed. That goes for screenwriters, too, but I think they have actually done a fairly good job of standing up for themselves.
The one relationship that immediately springs to mind, when I think of this type of thing, is Elton John and Bernie Taupin.
I understand that they split up for a while, and that Elton John's music lost its lustre during that period.
Although I like some of Elton John's work, I am not enough of a fan to speak in more than a fairly vague sense. I just remember people complaining about it, when it was happening.
Keith Reid was also given top billing, for Procol Harum. He usually showed up in group photos.
The EJ and Taupin collaboration is one of the greatest in pop music history, only Lennon/McCartney exceeds the quality and quantity of hits the team produced.
I'm sure it's not as cut and dry on every song necessarily but Elton writes the music and Taupin writes the lyrics. Of course EJ performs the songs.
Neither would be what they are without the other, certainly, the same as Lennon and McCartney's solo work was great but didn't come close to their collaboration.
Anyways just want to point out EJ isn't one of the "manufactured" pop artists who had others write his songs for him. He's a true artist and musician in his own right even though Taupin is obviously hugely important to his success.
That's beside the point. The performers are starting to demand a portion of the revenue stream that should be going to "people who aren't the performers".
I don't have an opinion on the ethics of this one way or the other, but the pop stars should be responding by asking why the songwriters signed the particular contract they are complaining about in the first place if they felt so strongly about this.
That's a classic rent seeking argument, where people make money depending on how easy it is for them to sabotage something as opposed to how much they contribute.
MusicBrainz has a relationship top-level called "writer" and under there are more specific relations "composer", "lyricist", "librettist" and "translator".
Do you also believe software developers should take a smaller cut/salary to pay more to sales, because without sales selling the product it is worthless? That's the equivalent to the argument you are making.
I mean, I have sympathy for the writers, but I also don't believe that it's necessarily equitable that a songwriter receives all the money when a song is played on the radio but the performer receives nothing (that is my understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong).
Consider the case of "I Will Always Love You", written and originally performed by Dolly Parton but made globally famous by Whitney Houston. I mean, Parton is a pretty legendary songwriter, but let's be honest, the only reason that song was played over and over on the radio was Houston's voice. When Houston died and the song was again put in rotation on the radio, is it really fair that Parton received all the benefit of that and Houston's estate nothing?
In this case the writers are talking about "publishing" rights which are distinct and separate from the sound recording (I believe those are called the "master" rights).
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Copyright is split into two main sections: copyright in the song (known as publishing rights) and copyright in the sound recording (known as master rights). The publisher only deals with the publishing right, which is the songwriting side and includes the music and lyrics.
Traditionally, a record label will own the master right, which is basically the right to use a particular recording of that song, but if you’re a self-releasing artist or producer then you will most likely own this right yourself.
No. This is a subtle difference but a very important one. In the US, the performance right on broadcast radio is not collected at all. The publishing rights are collected on.
That's really not the same thing as "publishers take all the money".
Yes, what you've written about broadcast vs. publishing rights on the radio is correct, but what I wrote "In the US a performer still receives nothing when the song is played on the radio, all the royalties go to the writers" is still 100% correct (I made no mention about the source of the rights), so I'm not sure why you started your comment with "No."
Performing artists can also collect performance royalties, but I think am/fm radio is excluded from this and I don't know how much it is in comparison to songwriter royalties.
This unfortunately has been a long used tactic in the music world. In the old times it was sharpie producers putting their names as writers for songs of poor black artists, so they (the producers) can get royalties in addition to their usual fees. Now it is the singers taking advantage of the songwriters and composers.
It is all evil but it kind of shows who has the negotiation leverage. Todays pop music scene is all about creating a celebrity image consumers want to identify with. Once said image is created the actual music is not that important. So the writers do not get much credit.
As a huge fan of blackpink I highly recommend you check out the documentary they have on Netflix. It became obvious after watching it that the genius behind blackpink is Teddy Park, who was also behind another massively successful girl group 2NE1.
I've thought about it slightly and without Teddy Park there is no blackpink, but without the individual members each bringing their own flavour to the group, there is no blackpink either.
If you're familiar with the concept art industry, this is essentially just character design but with living people.
We are being fed a story, Katy Perry and Ariana Grande are good examples of this.
With these types of "manufactured" performance groups I don't think there's any question that they are not composers. The Lady Gaga case (she promotes herself as a composer / guitarist / pianist) is much more of an intentional mislead, in my opinion.
I'd say they are performers not artists. The girl running Photoshop is an artist, the HP LaserJet that prints it out isn't. We don't consider choir members to be artists, but if it's just one voice we assume they are?
Members of the choir are performing artists. They make artistic choices related to the actual performance of the song, like how to sing the words written on the page.
Members of the choir do not make those choices. The conductor does. The singers are the instrument in that case. Like a pipe in an organ. Their job is to blend and produce the sounds according to the interpretation of the conductor. Source: am a choir member. You will be fired if you interpret the music against the conductor's desires.
No argument there. Does she credit her songwriters? Is it well known that she doesn't write 100%? Or does that not matter to anyone because she's so awesome?
> "I have worked with and written with some UNREAL artists who let me into their lives to create with them who deserved their credit and publishing, ..."
I think most people think she falls under this category.
I know that the average clubgoerand radio listener assumes songs are produced entirely by the headline artist. From my life experience advocating for composers.
Why isn't there a question about manufactured performance groups not being composers? There are manufactured performance groups that are composers and they look just like Blackpink. An example of such a group is GI-DLE
Katy Perry found success as a songwriter before she found success as a singer, and has written songs for Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Selena Gomez, and Nikki Minaj, among others. (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/katy-perry-wr...) Most of her own songs are co-written in studio with her collaborators on the song (meaning the feat artist and the producers), with each collaborator pitching in or more of the hooks or verses.
Ariana Grande has written a few of her own songs (though none of these were released as singles).
Perhaps you meant that neither Katy Perry or Ariana Grande are composers (who write the instrumental portion of the song)?
I think they mean "Katy Perry" and "Ariana Grande" are fictional characters as the public knows them. They are characters played by two artists and supported by media/storytelling.
This reminds me a bit of what I've heard about pro wrestling. There's a bit more story and theater to pro wrestling, but a lot of times the characters' personality derives from the person 'playing' them, with the knob turned to 12.
For others wondering about this style of entertainment, it's called 'kayfabe'
"Kayfabe, in the United States, is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe during a show would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera."
Outside of the entertainment industry, politics is an obvious example, though wikipedia states:
"It has long been claimed that kayfabe has been used in American politics, especially in election campaigns, Congress, and the White House, but no evidence of actual usage of kayfabe in Washington has ever been uncovered. In interviews as Governor of Minnesota, former wrestler Jesse Ventura often likened Washington to wrestling when he said that politicians "pretend to hate each other in public, then go out to dinner together.""
I find the idea of being fed a story fascinating because a successful story feels more real than life itself and I'm not sure you can separate the two (life and the stories we tell ourselves). Once you can see it for what it is, that it's just a story, it breaks the illusion. But a really powerful story sucks you back in time and time again, and sometimes, you forget that you were being told a story in the first place.
And now after typing the above paragraph I sit wondering how many stories I currently believe are real, are just stories after all. Money being one of the most powerful.
It's broken down of there is X royalties then A, B, C, D each have percentages. In this Case Say producers are A, they're getting a cut that's established, but now they're taking a percentage of D. So in this instance they're expanding their ownership through pressure of taking a cut from someone else.
Record producers are not entitled to royalties unless they have songwriting, composer, or performance credits on a song. Essentially, they're the guys who bring everyone together and make sure a song comes out at the end.
Many record producers do participate in the songwriting or composition process and are credited for that work (for example, Jay-Z), but the vast majority don't (for example, Glen Wallachs, co-founder of Capital Records).
Some producers do get "points" just for production, even if they don't get a full writer credit.
Production can mean anything and everything from project management, sound design, co-writing, arranging to hands-on instrumental parts - to turning up once a week and saying "Sounds great. Carry on."
The split depends on the producer/artist agreement.
Session musicians don't usually get points even though they may literally write their parts. In publishing terms a song is melody+lyrics, and everything else is work-for-hire arrangement.
This often gets renegotiated because it's clearly nonsense. But that's the starting point.
No, the law, and more importantly, the guilds (here, the SGA and SCL), are quite strict on these points.
A producer cannot "negotiate" creative credit if they did not earn it, because the guilds will not allow it.
If a producer wants writing credit, they must earn the writing credit by performing creative activities as specified by the guild rules. Project management and other "producing" activities do not count. Note however that the creative contributions of session musicians under WFH arrangements are generally attributed to their employer--i.e., to the producer, and SCL rules generally apply to determine the creative contribution the producer may claim for the work of session musicians.
Co-writing and arranging are not "producing" activities, they are writing and composition activities which can qualify for songwriting and composing credit. Few producers participate creatively in their songs, but the ones that do tend to be the more famous ones (like Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Dr. Luke, etc.) and are use usually artists in their own right.
They added that composers were often subjected to "bully tactics and threats" by artists and executives who wanted to take a share of the songwriting royalties.
Ultimately, I wonder where the money ends up between the artist and the executive.
This article (not the pact's message) seems to be unfairly framing this as writers vs artists, but the real bad guy could be some suit at UMI or EMG...
It sucks for the writers all the same, but don't misplace your anger.
Labels have been cooking the books and running dirty schemes since forever. Hell even Pink Floyd wrote a song about it.
I would not be shocked in the slightest if a few artists are increasingly also starting to throw their weight around and that is gaining some traction and becoming more of a norm as well. Thats also not new, ranging from the inane (no brown m&m's back stage) to stuff like this.
I think a lot of people would be shocked to learn that
1. Many artists dont write their own songs
2. Many bands dont perform in their own studio albums and often use hired guns/session musicians
3. A lot of 1&2 are actually a relatively small number of people with a pretty prodigious output.
People like Max Martin, Ryan Tedder, Sia Furler, Dr. Luke, Bonnie McKee in the current sphere/conversation.
But even going back to Elvis...Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller are the actual writers for Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock etc. And theres some for other Genre's, Motown had their own with Lamont Dozier and Brian and Eddie Holland. Otis Blackwell, Prince Nelson Rogers etc etc.
This revelation happened for me when i started getting into playing music. Over the years I have gained appreciation for those that dont really need to deal with 1 and 2, but that takes a very special type of talent and dedication.
The m&m's story might be misrepresented here. The true story is that they had extremely complicated rigging for their stage show. By putting the M&M's into the contract (a canary of sorts) they were able to ensure that it was read. Otherwise they knew immediately there could be problems.
I see that claim a lot and it's obviously a nice story. But isn't it quite likely that they were just acting like obnoxious rock stars, and they made up the story later when they didn't like being legendary for being assholes anymore? Or are we just taking their word for it?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Not no evidence except the word of the person denying a story which paints them in a bad light.
If true, it is very surprising. Surely in most venues the people responsible for back stage hospitality are not the same people responsible for lighting, electrics, sound installation and stage safety? Isn't it quite likely that one of those teams would have met the requirements perfectly, and the other would have cut corners? How about the situation where extremely professional and scrupulous venues do all the important things right but resent having to sort M&Ms for overpaid stars? Wouldn't it have made more sense for Van Halen to have their own electrical inspectors who would check safety and reliability of the installation? How do other touring rock groups make sure everything is set up correctly? How did Van Halen come up with this particular canary test among all others?
Is it really that conspiratorial that an extremely famous 20 year old acted like a dick, and that at age thirty he made up a story to cover up his youthful dickishness?
Your assertion that they were dicks is funny. Even if they just didn't like brown M&Ms if they were paying for the venue then surely it was no different than expecting their personal luggage to be carried to the dressing room, or having banners hung. Why is this request so egregious that it's dickish but having the right brand of sparkling water is not?
> Surely in most venues the people responsible for back stage hospitality are not the same people
They all get paid from the same pool. It's the boss they're testing, not the stage hand.
Does the boss treat every requirement like a requirement and have it done seriously or do they pick and choose based on what they think is important and surprise the artist?
The original story has been told for around 50 years with the widely noted implication "this was dickish behavior - they didn't have any particular preference for non-brown M&Ms but just wanted to mess with the people waiting on them". Even the 'debunkings' invariably recognize this interpretation of the original story.
Obviously part of the reason this story gets told a lot is because a lot of people, many of them management consultants who charge by the day for nuggets of catchy wisdom like this one, love the idea that organizations have a homogenous culture and the same ones that skimp on the buffet preparation also skimp on the rigging safety. Actually, this is complete fantasy. It's perfectly believable to think that the same boss makes sure the artists have everything in their dressing room they want, no matter how demanding, but thinks that they won't check the bigger, critical but more expensive stuff.
> The original story has been told for around 50 years with the widely noted implication "this was dickish behavior
I didn't ask when people started making up the claim, I asked how the claim was reasonable. The person sorting M&Ms would have been paid just the same. How does a reasonable request become dickish?
> they didn't have any particular preference for non-brown M&Ms but just wanted to mess with the people waiting on them"
Mess with? There's that unsupported judgement again. Am I messing with the cook if I ask for less salt, or no onions on my burger? Or are those valid things for a customer to want? Do I have to prove a medical reason for not wanting onions? Or brown M&Ms?
> management consultants [...] love the idea that organizations have a homogenous culture and the same ones that skimp on the buffet preparation also skimp on the rigging safety.
That's generally true but it doesn't need to be. If it saved them one bad show ever it's worth it. Even if it didn't, if they thought it would it was still probably a safe investment.
I'd be happy if a performer went out of their way to make sure that a live event that I paid for and travelled to attend went off without a hitch. To do otherwise would be dickish.
While I’ve heard David Lee Roth’s argument here. I’m not sure I buy it. For one, the rider itself somewhat had a Streisand effect of its own. So it wasn’t much of a canary once it was public knowledge.
And two. Most large touring acts have all sorts of heavy equipment. Zepp, Skynyrd had enourmous amounts of stuff. Even to date, RHCP has a boat load of gear they lug around because like many they don’t use a venues PA, they use their own gear because it’s quintessential to their tone. Hell the Grateful Dead had a wall of sound.
All that is to say....sure that could be a reason. May even have been the reasoning to start out. But I’m not sure I buy it personally. That band was also known for their.....persona. Especially with David Lee Roth.
Everyone loves the free market up the point of monopoly. Same ol story different bizniz. IMHO since the fall of the Wall Conservatives have stopped bothering to justify the free market as providing for all and have adopted Monopoly as a right of the rich. As if they earned their monopoly. The truth is more that government corrupt^M^M^M lobbying, has permitted it.
I'd be proud even if it wasn't a massive hit. It's an insanely catchy song, performed by two women who deliver the lines perfectly, on top of a very creative production (I especially like the repetitive "there's some hoes in this house" line that plays throughout the entire song).
I don't think it's fair to the people involved to paint it something it's not just because the sexual language makes you uncomfortable.
fwiw, it's not the sexual imagery that bothers most people, it's the degradation they hear in the rest of the song.
"Hoes in this house" for example.
Sex is natural, calling women whores is not. One is a fine thing for a kid to see, the other is problematic and requires you to explain that their language shouldn't be repeated, that it's probably indicative of depression or systematic oppression of women, etc.
Nothing in the song appears to be feminine empowerment as they defend it by saying - it's just soft-core porn masquerading as music. Porn is porn and when made without harm is a lifestyle choice, it's the masquerade that makes it icky.
That's completely fair criticism in my opinion, but not the one I see invoked by most people. In my experience, most of the time the sexual language is the problem, and that is completely bonkers to me because, as you said, sex is a big part of human life and it makes sense for it to be reflected in art.
Actually, I have since watched a bit of the video and I now think it is the imagery as well.
Not the scantily clad ladies dry-humping. But that they look like they're doing it for the male gaze, as they stare into the camera instead of each other's eyes.
I guess it feels like what you'd get if you tried to have a three-way with two hookers. Hollow and depressing.
While I agree with you that there's definitely a male gaze aspect to it, I don't have an opinion on whether that's necessarily a bad thing when done by women.
On the one hand I can see the harm it can make by normalizing the stigma that women need to do things for the pleasure of men, but on the other hand I'm not sure preventing them from doing that would help the issue at all. It's a complex subject for sure.
Prevent? Gosh, no. I am sure that nothing good would come from that. As you say, if they choose it... (And if someone likes it, good for Cardi I guess.)
I'm just trying to answer your question from a few posts back about what I found distasteful. The best summary I can come up with is 'women trying to act like whores to be attractive'.
Maybe that's not how it is for Cardi, and that's her image of healthy sexuality, but I wouldn't show it to my kids or my lover.
As an aside, I realized that I watched the grammy performance which may not be the same as the music video.
You know what he's about. He's just a boring old culture warrior who has to inject his personal politics into every situation while simultaneously decrying how everything is now political.
In American rap culture, rap artists are usually expected to write their own lyrics without significant help from other songwriters, with the exception of samples, production, and any parts of the song that are not rapped.
That's why the WAP songwriters are the rappers (Megan thee Stallion and Cardi B), the producers (Ayo N Keyz), and the songwriter of the sampled track (Frank Ski). Many other genres do not have this kind of expectation.
If you are accusing the WAP songwriters of employing ghostwriters, that is a severe allegation and needs evidence to be taken seriously.
Why does Google or Microsoft pay coders to write software. Their work is nothing without the big company bringing it all together and the brand?
Are you saying that the song writers should give their work away for free?
The credit is tied to the method the song writers use to be paid for their work. This is coupled to pay. When an artist puts their name on the song lyrics they are taking pay from the people who wrote the lyrics.
This is like saying Taylor Swift's grocery store deserves a cut of her royalties because she wouldn't be able to sing if she starved to death.
Song-writers get paid poorly because there is more supply of pop songs than demand for them. Taylor Swift's grocery store doesn't get a cut of her revenue because Taylor Swift could easily just switch to another grocery store. The same as she could easily switch to another song-writer (or write her own songs).
They do get a cut of her royalties, when she goes there to buy food. I’d question your assertion that one songwriter is just as good as another when we consider how many hits can be attributed to the same people if you actually check.
That's not an equivalent analogy. It's the exact opposite in fact. The equivalent analogies would be:
Why don't screenwriters just film their own movies?
Why don't composers just form their own orchestras?
Why don't architects just build their own skyscrapers?
The screenwriter example should make it obvious why these song-writers' complaints are baseless. A movie filmed by amateur videographers with no editing experience, no acting talent, and no marketing is not going to achieve mainstream success no matter how good the writing is. Meanwhile movies with terrible writing rake in huge numbers at the box office just because they have big name actors and top-of-the-line production quality (ex: the Avengers). This is because the script isn't particularly important to the success of the movie. Hence why the script writer doesn't get paid a large percentage of royalties.
If the quality of song-writing was a key determinant in the success of a song, the song-writers would have leverage to negotiate better royalties. But it isn't, so they don't. If you don't like it, stop listening to pop music. There are plenty of struggling artists playing their own compositions in dive bars on friday nights that would love your support.
> Meanwhile movies with terrible writing rake in huge numbers at the box office just because they have big name actors and top-of-the-line production quality (ex: the Avengers)
You sure it's just that? All the DC superhero movies also have big name actors, top-of-the-line production quality, heavy marketing and merchandise tie-ins. Yet those movies have been largely duds. They don't have the same resonance in contemporary popular culture as the Marvel movies. Or ratings by moviegoers and film critics. They're generally considered dour, stodgy, weirdly paced, illogical, or lacking soul.
The scripts for the MCU movies won't win any film awards with the "ivory tower film snob"-type of moviegoer. But they're outstanding examples of the craft of screenwriting for their genre. And I'm speaking as someone who generally finds superhero movies and comic books, including the Marvel ones, kinda tedious. I don't listen to pop music either.
The MCU movies have wit, humor, sentiment, perfect pacing, and a tone appropriate to the characters (Guardians of the Galaxy movies are silly and playful, Captain America movies are more serious, Thor movies have an epic/Shakespearean feel). They do a good job of staying faithful to the source material while still being comprehensible to casual watchers. You think elves do all that? It takes serious writing skill, and every screenwriter isn't capable of it.
> A movie filmed by amateur videographers with no editing experience, no acting talent, and no marketing is not going to achieve mainstream success no matter how good the writing is.
"Professional movie-making requires multiple specialists" is not breaking news to anyone. The topic of discussion here is one of the specialists don't want to share credit with people who weren't involved in their work. Would it be OK if an actor demanded a makeup artist credit because they ran a comb through their own hair on set once?
- Consistently coming up with good melodies/hooks along with lyrics is fairly difficult to do time and time again.
- Without writers/composers the artists would have nothing to perform. It goes both ways.
- They’re not asking for all the revenue. They’re asking to be fairly paid for their portion of the writing. The artists still get their portion, as does the label, etc. They’re also asking artists to not take credit for writing that they did not do.
My opinion is that they shouldn't care and in fact have no basis to complain. I consider it "work for hire", and they are being paid handsomely for their work. Do we developers complain when, if we work for Apple, that Apple takes credit for our work?
I think the complaint is that they aren't being paid "adequately", but without actual numbers it's hard to tell. I suspect few of them are making SV developer salaries.
Most songwriters write songs then shop them around. They're not typically freelancers writing a song for an act for pay. They're like small software shops writing source code, and then the company that licenses that code, compiles it, and sells it is wanting a copyright on the source and royalties on other licenses sold.
Yes, and when you regularly ask too much of the other party in those negotiations they band together and ask you to stop. Much like what's happening in the story.
Have you read the article? "Credit" here is not meant as recognition, it's meant as retribution. Performers put their name down as writers/producers despite being no part of the songwriting process, taking a cut from the writer's revenue, and additionally get revenue for their performance + merch, concert tickets, etc.
As someone who grew up with the advent of the world wide web and got my start coding on Geocities, I very much appreciate the choice to add a scrolling marquee and visit counter towards the bottom of the site.
Geocities, Angelfire, and Maxpages. GIFs everywhere. Backgrounds tiled with GIFs. If it didn't sparkle in some way that distracted from the content of the page, you weren't doing it right.
Never underestimate the pro-capitalist apologists of HN. This forum would insist that Milli Vanilli did nothing wrong and were simply "smart business men."
Are pop songs inherently valuable? Artistically they're not usually interesting but in the market sense, would people listen to them without the massive marketing push?
I strongly support distribution of profits in the relation to the value being created. While it is absolutely possible, even commonplace, for organizations to exploit their workers and other smaller orgs, I also suspect that value in "hit" songs is created elsewhere: in production, marketing, name recognition of the singer, etc.
I'm not an IP lawyer, but I have a handful of patents. As a patent lawyer explained to me, the list of inventors on a patent should be strictly based on whether somebody actually invented something or not. It's not like an academic paper, where everybody on the team gets to be an "author."
In my view the same thing should apply to songwriting. The current standard is, you wrote a song if you wrote the melody or the words. Sometimes those are two different people.
If you added value in other ways, add your name to some other contract specifying distribution of proceeds.
The songwriting is extremely valuable, otherwise just write your own damn songs.
As an aside, "inherent value" is a mushy concept that seems to defy any meaningful description.
The songwriting is extremely valuable, otherwise just write your own damn songs.
If it's so valuable, how can these companies find "hit" writers for £100 a piece? While it is entirely possible for something of immense artistic or technical value to not be priced commensurately on the market, I've heard these songs, this is not the case here.
Because the hit writers who are working for $100 a piece, are expecting that if their song gets picked up, they will share in its success through their publishing royalties.
If you do that, then performers will just exert their power in other ways (by reducing royalties for song-writers).
Fundamentally, this is happening because the quality of the song-writing isn't really all that important to the success of a pop star. Marketing, production quality, and sex appeal are more important. It's really not that hard to write a 4-chord song about breaking up with your boyfriend.
If song-writers think they should be getting rich off these popular songs, there is nothing stopping them from performing the song themselves. They don't do that though because they know they'll make more money letting Taylor Swift sing it.
It’s all aesthetics to be sure but a lot of pop music doesn’t take risks. Song structures are formulaic as are chord progressions and the notes used for melodies.
How many hit songs use the same I-V-vi-IV progression? It works is why but it isn’t interesting to a discerning listener.
It seems like a lot of pop music is more like fashion than music. Image leads and after removing the stylistic facade you see the same underlying infrastructure. There are exceptions to the rule of course.
Nirvana was an interesting pop music band because many of their songs used weird progressions. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” shouldn’t work according to therory, but it obviously does.
And then of course how pop music is mixed and mastered today. Almost no dynamic range because of the “loudness wars”.
That's fair criticism, but I don't think it makes pop music any less artistic. There's something to be said about music that goes beyond the listener's ears and also taps into fashion, make-up trends, viral dances and that kind of stuff. That's where the risk is, and while it's paid off in the past (like Lady Gaga, David Bowie, etc), there's also numerous cases where it didn't as much (Ava Max, Viktoria Modesta).
I also believe there's artistic value in music that understands it's just ear-candy and doesn't try to be something else. In a world where so many people are trying to score a hit with the same chord progression for example, the ones that succeed stand out in other factors, and in my opinion it doesn't matter if it's some catchy verse on the refrain or something about the performer like Lady Gaga's provocative performances back in the early 2010s.
It is what it is - it is popular for a reason. It doesn’t require effort from the listener and as you pointed out it lets people identify with a culture, etc. there’s a reason most people stop seeking out new music in their mid-20’s. Popular music is mainly a youth product which lets each cohort draw cultural boundaries from previous generations.
What’s great about modern info tech is it makes it easier to explore artists of your youth that you never knew about. You can get really deep which makes it feel like now music is still being made for you.
It isn’t like there aren’t infinite other styles for people that want it. Jazz is a great example of “musicians music” - lots of interesting ideas get explored there and dissonance is used which you rarely find in pop.
They actually have software that helps crank out hits nowadays. It’s an interesting time to be a songwriter in Nashville.
Yes, they're valuable because they capture many listeners and generate revenue. It doesn't need to interesting for it to be valuable.
Plenty of interesting music flies under the radar. Even without the massive marketing push some artists get, the same artists would still rise to the top producing familiar song structures the average listener can recognize.
It seems as though this is not a well understood issue from reading the comments here. This isn’t artists doing interviews and saying “I wrote this”. The problem is that the artists are bullying their way into getting points for the song writing credits (publishing royalties) when they had little(change a word in the lyrics) or no input into the song.
I fully support artists getting as much of the live performance/merch/appearances money as they can. If they did not write a song they should not be getting paid for songwriting. All of the justifications in the article dating back to Elvis Presley show how long the business has been slimy.
This is a large reason behind why I switched to programming after receiving a bachelors in media arts. I’ve had bad experiences with people claiming work they didn’t do, and getting away with it because they knew people.
My favorite was in grad school -- six weeks into a final project, the professor emailed us "we noticed one of your assigned group member's name was missing from the project mid-term report". We were all like huh? What 5th group member? This person was assigned to our random group at week 0 and had never bother to even introduce himself in five weeks! Free rider galore.
It was a 13 week class and the person minimally contributed by just showing up to meetings such that you couldn't say "he didn't show up." We had to do some D3js visualizations and one time he even sent a photo shreenshot of a chart rather than actual code to embed onto our project site.
One time he gave us a hard time about not being able to meet at any point except his lunch-hour. So we're all on Eastern Time at 3pm during the workday and he's on zoom...eating a sandwich as we spoke. So we gave up, we didnt even include him on any conversations because it was negative value.
In speaking with other students, 5-10% of the graduating class were complete free riders. Some were sponsored (e.g., federal government employees, etc) and were not only free-riders in terms of work, but also in terms of cost. Further, when graded your team got graded based on how many people you had, which many of us spoke up against especially given randomly assigned groups.
That said, some of my randomly assigned teammates were awesome, we're still friends, we formed great bonds and I wouldnt want to miss that experience.
One of the most fair way to handle group projects grading was in my capstone business management course. At the end, the 6 of us each had to (privately) rank everyone else according to their contribution, and the assessment by your peers was 20% of the grade for the project.
Because someone had to come in last place, it eased a lot of the tension and created a much more pleasant group dynamic:
- The free-rider(s) were perfectly okay with jumping on the grenade, filling the last-place spot, and knocking 20% off their final grade in exchange for doing very little work and still passing the class.
- The lazier people who did care about their grade were a bit more motivated to contribute than they otherwise would've been.
- The go-getters who wanted to ace the class felt like they were fairly compensated for doing most of the heavy lifting.
We had a fairly similar grading program in my IT capstone project. The professor made it clear that if a group had either a total grifter or was an all-star team exceptions could be made. We had to give lots of presentations and question and answer sessions. It was generally pretty clear to the entire class which students were slackers and couldn't answer questions and which ones knew their stuff.
>> If they did not write a song they should not be getting paid for songwriting.
What does "write the song" mean though? You hear lots of remix and cover versions of famous songs which are obviously derivative works, but what if that happens before the song is ever published? What if a song writer creates a song specifically for an artist? Do these stylistic influences count for writing credit? The line is not well defined.
I think the line is pretty well defined. If a songwriter writes a song specifically for an artist, that doesn't indicate any less skill and definitely doesn't mean the artist added anything meaningful. That song could have just as easily (as in the Elvis example) been recorded by another artist. That's akin to saying that I took inspiration from the Harry Potter books, so I should give JK Rowling a cut of my book deal.
As for remixes and covers, I'd say that if there was a change made that significantly altered or changed the song, it would be considered involvement. It seems that from the article, remixing or changing the song to the point where you would consider it substantially different is enough for a share of publishing revenues.
Bottom line is that while it's still subjective, most musicians and songwriters would have no trouble recognizing if someone else had a substantial impact on the final product.
>>That's akin to saying that I took inspiration from the Harry Potter books, so I should give JK Rowling a cut of my book deal.
Yup, just to be clear in that case, if you are writing about the characters JKR created, with their attributes, personas, and/or backstories, you are fully expected to license the characters and pay royalties to JKR. You are specifically utilizing her copyrighted works for profit, even if you don't use a single line of pre-existing dialogue.
This is why we don't have a million non-Disney Mickey Mouse stories, media, videos, etc. - Disney owns the copyright on not only the specific prior works but also the characters.
No question, influence and creative origin count, and should be compensated.
Wow, what an unexpectedly inane and ignorant comment on HN.
That is like saying: "I just drove by a cop at 3mph over the speed limit and he didn't even turn on his lights. No fine paid." (implying that therefore speed limit laws don't exist)
The fact that many trivial violations go un-prosecuted never invalidates the law.
Here's a key line just a few paragraphs into a Georgetown Law paper on the topic [1]
>>Many entertainment corporation shave left fan fiction alone, but a few have attempted and are attempting to stamp out unauthorized use of their proprietary characters.
It is very common. Your trivial "example" may come under fair use, but that says nothing about the actual facts of the matter.
I think there are clear cases where someone did or didn’t write a song, but there are also very blurry areas in the middle (and these areas are where the debate actually matters). My impression is that it’s not uncommon for people at many stages in the audio engineering and music production to change things that may or may not be considered part of “writing the song.”
Indeed, and it goes back before Elvis. Screwing popular songwriters of their royalties has been a fixture of the music business since time immoral. From what I've read, Jelly Roll Morton's publisher added his own lyrics to Morton's instrumental tunes, to get a cut of the royalties. And it goes back before the recording industry. Before the phonograph, the "music business" was sheet music, there were "stars," and sheet music composers experienced all of the shenanigans that we associate with the music business today.
Gene Roddenberry added lyrics to the theme song of the original Star Trek series – which were never actually sung in the opening credits – just so he could get part of the royalties.
The entire system seems incredibly open to bad faith abuse.
An interesting correlation is that songwriters used to be popularly-famous. Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin stick out.
But I can't confidently name a single songwriter from the last 50 years, aside from the ones that were predominantly popular performers and recorded-music artists (Roger Waters, Lennon/McCartney, James Taylor).
To me, not knowing any better, this suggests that songwriters had more economic self-determination within the music industry, which translates into influence and cachet, in the 1920s than they do in the 2020s.
Today, again as an outsider, it seems like publishers and managers have an outsized influence, because they control the economics more than any other entity in the system.
It depends how well-known you have to be to be well known, but for some level of well-known, off the top of my head:
Leiber and Stoller, Ashford and Simpson, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, Rod Temperton, Diane Warren, Desmond Child, and Max Martin are well known songwriters from more modern times.
However, their hits are much better known than they are, compared to the great American songbook guys. Although there are other very successful songwriters from that era with less name recongnition, for example, Johnny Mercer or Harry Warren.
Ghost producing is also a thing, I've heard stories of a producer getting $700 or $600 for fairly popular track because the the actual song is credited to someone else.
Hell, in hip hop it's not unheard of for bigger artist to outright steal ideas and concepts from underground artists. Then you can remake the song as your own, and if you decide to reach back and compensate the original artist that's okay but as far as I can tell you'll very rarely get into legal trouble.
It's not like 10% of sales goes to the song writer, so the artist changing a word means that the artist gets and additional 1% and the song writer only 9%. Surely at the point of producing a contract everyone negotiates the split and signs the contract if they are happy with the deal.
Few people are ever happy with a contract. That's why it's a contract in the first place. If everyone were happy, there'd be no need to make breaking the terms of one actionable.
Think of it as separate pies. Album sales will be split into at least 3 pieces. Album sales are the first pie. Firstly the label will have to recoup cost of production, sample clearance, video production etc to recoup. The producers and songwriters will likely get paid here as well, but the artist will get paid only after it recoups. Fuzzy math comes into play here and 10 million selling albums may never recoup...
Next there is the mechanical royalties that come from radio play, streaming, licensing agreements, etc. Those largely go to the owner of the composition(e.g. songwriter) from 25% up to 90ish percent depending on the publishing deal.
The live performance aspect is where the artist can rake it in if they play things smart. The live show largely goes to the artist(*as long as there is not a 360 deal in place*) They can charge what they can get, and sell merch at the show. If they produce their own merch they can probably net a nice profit. If they let a merch company "handle it for them" they will see 10 cents on the dollar or less. Artists can get into trouble if they make their shows too big and would only break even/run at a loss.
360 deals are a particularly insidious anti artist beast. Basically the label throws their might behind the artist and gets a large cut of ALL aspects of the money they make being an artist.(live shows,merch, everything) I suspect many of the big names at least start out in a 360 deal these days, and may have negotiating power once they become Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga or Ariana Grande.
Songwriters probably have the least negotiating power in this situation. When an artist has 50 songwriting teams throwing tracks their way, a suboptimal deal may have to be accepted just to have a shot at making the album. While I am not saying songwriting is not a talent(it most certainly is), unfortunately more people have said talent than there are A-List stars.
Sorry, but this is wrong. First of all the rates for publishing royalties are standardized and typically wouldn't be renegotiated on a song-by-song or project-by-project basis. So it is very similar to '10% of sales goes to the song writer'.
Equally important is the fact that a share of publishing means a share of all sorts of royalties which aren't negotiated case by case. For example for playing the song on the radio, in restaurants, on TV shows, etc. But even more insidiously, it applies to cover versions. So if Elvis Presley gets a 50% songwriting credit, he will then take 50% of the portion due to the songwriter on any version recorded or played live by anyone (who hasn't added the 'Presley magic'), at any time in the future.
However I think being able to say "I (co-)wrote this" also plays a part - especially in Elvis' time, actual singer-songwriters were probably held in greater esteem than artists that were just "parroting" songs others wrote for them, so giving the impression that they were involved in writing the songs may have been important from that perspective too...
I always thought the artists make token edits to the songs so they can keep up the charade of writing their own songs for marketing reasons.
Someone told me "Taylor Swift writes her own songs." Sure, but when you look at the songwriters on 1989, over half of them were at least co-written by the song writer with the most #1 hits after McCartney and Lennon.
I looked this up and while some of her older hits were just credited to her, a really impressive number of them were co-written by Liz Rose, who I’ve never even heard of.
Looking at Folklore on wikipedia Antonof or Dessner are on most of the tracks. Do I think she took a couple of Indie music people to help her write/produce etc songs in a new style? Clearly. Does that actually mean she just added a word here and there though?
Trying to infer whether on not Taylor Swift writes her own songs based on consistent collaborators seems odd to me.
Swift writes her own music. She works with collaborators and producers but she writes her own music. Dessner sent her instrumental tracks that she turned into folklore (writing to track), it was similar with Antonof. This isn’t a marketing charade, she’s literally a songwriter first.
She has included song-writing voice memos that show the progression of how she wrote certain songs on 1989 and the documentary “Miss Americana” clearly shows her songwriting process (as does this collection of clips from an AT&T promo she did for Reputation https://youtu.be/I4WlSnWtkt8).
Liz Rose, who co-wrote some of Swift's earlier songs (including the much-loved, “All Too Well”), described the process of working with her as editing [1], something all of her other collaborators have said too.
There are a lot of pop stars who get a writing credit for doing very little on a track but Taylor Swift isn’t one of them. If anything, she’s been quite clear that her success is directly tied to her songwriting. Her voice alone (especially as a teenager) wouldn’t have made her a star. It was her songs, paired with her voice and her personality that made everything work.
There are a lot of rock singers whose talent isn't actually singing. Neil Young, for example. His songwriting and arrangements are so good one doesn't notice he doesn't have a good voice for singing.
I'm not so sure that isn't just confirmation bias.
Compare his voice to that of, say, A-ha's lead singer. Now that guy has a voice. The same with the lead singer of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
One reason Neil Young appeals to me is because he has an unremarkable voice yet succeeded anyway. Yah gotta respect that.
I remember when Stevie Nicks burst on the scene. All the reviews were she had a lousy, raspy voice that nobody would like. But she soon won everyone over :-)
Young's voice suffers terribly from age, so I think both views are correct depending on which recording you're looking at. Pretty sure that live recording of Old Man is from his 1971 Live at Massey Hall recording, which is him near his peak.
I've seen several stars who started their career in the late sixties, and I'd say everyone of their voices "sounded great" while also being considerably worse than their debut period. I don't think even Neil Young would disagree here, I'm pretty sure he has openly discussed some of the vocal issues he had.
That song is a masterpiece, and he sings it well. But that doesn't mean the tone of his voice is great. It's just such a great song that we transfer that to his tone. A singer is stuck with his tone, no amount of training and technique will change it.
If Rihanna sings your song it might have a much greater chance of being a hit.10% of a million dollars is better than 100% of 10000 dollars. You just have to do the math and figure if its worth it or not.
Maybe I'm just pissy from being subjected to 60 hours a week of top 40 radio for the last month at work, but I don't think any of them deserves a dime. In fact, I think they owe me something for pain and suffering.
I swear I'm not a music snob. 6 months ago when I heard this batch of songs the first time, I thought some of them were pretty catchy. Although I don't know that anyone will argue this was a great year for music. But I heard that "go out with a bang" song at least 4 times yesterday. About a week ago, I finally listened to the lyrics and started to like it a little. Then I heard it 20 more times and I'm over it.
- This is an issue due to large corporations owning many radio stations across the US.
- This is an issue due to music labels being unable or unwilling to take risks.
- Regardless if you like the music or not, people need to be fairly paid for their work. Musicians/Labels should not be strong-arming/bullying songwriters into taking credit for their work (and thus receiving royalties for work they did not do).
2020 was a great year for music, but not if you only listen to the radio...
The artists listed in the article are the same ones I have to listen to all day, which is why I thought my whining was relevant. I know there's good music out there and I've got it on my phone. I just didn't have my headphones charged yesterday and hit a wall listening to the same songs.
I don't listen to the radio on my own time. I've just been working with guys who cycle through 3 stations that all play the exact same songs.
One possible solution is to see if there are independently-run stations in your area. I live near a university, so there is a student-run station that explicitly is not allowed to play top-charting songs. So I get some good music discovery, and awkward banter from new djs. If you have access to a computer, then you have access to basically any station. soma.fm is pretty good.
It definitely is frustrating to see the same songs on the radio over and over, but that's really an issue from iHeartRadio (formerly Clear Channel) owning stations across the country. Boycott iHeartRadio if you can.
I just don't listen to the radio outside of the news and talk shows. We do have a college station that's pretty good most of the time, but it's not always my kind of music. I don't have access to a computer per se, but I've got one in my pocket. I just didn't have my headphones charged because I'll go through periods where I don't even want to listen to my own music and these bone conduction headphones don't have good enough quality to understand a podcast.
These two coworkers, actually, are excellent. I love working with them. Just their music choice for work is horrible. I'm pretty lucky that the only things I have to complain about here are the hours and background music.
It's manufacturing I guess you'd call it. It normally doesn't bother me. Most everyone here has a good variety they listen to. It's just the two I'm working with right now who are apparently ok with listening to top 40 stations all day long. It's largely my fault. I could have said something, but I was in a pissy mood to start and I tend to come off nastier than I mean to when I'm in a mood.
I wonder if Max Martin or Dr. Luke have these issues? Is it a matter of the larger the stable of artists and hits you have in your portfolio then the more negotiating power you have? I'm just curious, I honestly don't know.
According to "The Song Machine" [0], track-and-hook has largely replaced singer/songwriter for top hits. The book details how Dr. Luke (a very talented guitar player) himself works with a ProTools tech to lay down beats, chord progressions, and instrumentation, then outsources the melodies to "hook writers/topliners" - the working song is sent to ~20 topliners and they aren't compensated whatsoever unless their hook is selected for a song. Also, virtually all the lyrics are outsourced to lyricists, and so on. It's funny that, in turn, the producers themselves seem to outsource much of the songwriting - it's turtles all the way down!
The music business has been massively "democratized" last few decades.
Now anyone can record high quality music at home. Anyone can self publish their music for the world to enjoy. Both were unthinkable a few decades ago.
But there are still a few gatekeepers, and gatekeepers will usually charge for opening their gate. Why wouldn't they?
A megastar can choose to record any of dozens of equally good songs. Whoever they choose will sell 100x more. So in one sense it's fair they get a share of the money they create by adding their fame and talent to the song.
Having the power to bully does not justify bullying. They could negotiate the contract differently. Taking credit for something they didn't do is fraud, no matter how the market tolerates it.
> A megastar can choose to record any of dozens of equally good songs. Whoever they choose will sell 100x more. So in one sense it's fair they get a share of the money they create by adding their fame and talent to the song.
I don't think this is actually true, at least if you define "good" as "likely to be a hit". There's a reason top pop performers go for songs written by songwriters with a proven track record, the most famous of which is perhaps Max Martin. Not anyone can write (and produce) songs that consistently appeal to whatever the public preferences of the day are. And no one wants to take unnecessary risks.
"Now anyone can record high quality music at home."
Eh, to an extent. Audio production is a highly involved process. Few people have the equipment and knowledge to mic instruments & track sound properly, mix audio properly, apply professional-level production, master the tracks properly, master the album properly... It's not as easy as having a computer and some software.
You can get a pretty good sound at home now for sure but for professional albums you still need a decent professional studio. And even at home, getting good mics and hardware is still quite costly.
"A megastar can choose to record any of dozens of equally good songs."
There are famous or well-known (in the industry) songwriters that get chosen time and time again because they can consistently produce hits.
"Anyone" was a poor word choice. I meant more "any supremely talented musician".
A few decades ago, even the greatest talents in the world needed a recording contract to reach a large audience, and that went through a few large companies.
Today that still helps to get the best equipment and the best people working on your stuff. But you can also record in a home studio with better tech than The Beatles ever had access to.
Not a flat playing field at all, but I think a fair amount of people do come up that way.
As for the best songwriters... I don't really know the business, and I don't want to pretend to. You're probably right for the Megahits. Maybe I'm right for the filler tracks?
"A few decades ago, even the greatest talents in the world needed a recording contract to reach a large audience, and that went through a few large companies."
Ah yeah, this I do agree with. With today's tech it's relatively easy to get youtube/soundcloud-grade quality. It's not super cheap but one can get by with a decent camera, a decent usb interface like a scarlett 2i2, and a mic or two depending on the instrument.
It's never been easier to get discovered thanks to soundcloud, youtube, instagram, etc. Very different from having to play gigs at the right places (sometimes for a long time!) and hope one gets discovered by someone there. I was thinking more of professional studio albums.
My macbook pro and a decent USB microphone can produce far more professional demos than the Beatles could produce in 1964. If you listen to, say, the Lost Lennon Tapes, a high-school student can do higher-quality production today, based purely on youtube how-to videos.
Sufficient for a pro album ready for radio play? Probably not. But good enough to monetize on youtube? All day long.
There is a lot more to making good quality recordings then having good equipment. There's arrangement, mic placement, room acoustic treatment, mixing and EQ, mastering.
It feels like in order to have this conversation intelligently, we all need to me on the same page about how royalties work, and the difference in royalty types (at least mechanical vs performance royalties).
There's a lot of nuance here, though. Say that the song kicks around and kicks around a bunch of artists refuse it and then eventually an artist makes some changes to it and personalizes it, records it and makes it big. All of a sudden, because of the promotion behind that artist or whatever, the song has a lot of value. And the artists wanted points before they invested the time or whatever in to it.
I'm not saying that its right, only we always want to simplify things that aren't really simple.
From the comments I've read so far, I'd say next to nobody here knows the split difference between record contracts and publishing contracts.
Here's how it was when I studied this 15 years ago.
In a traditional big four record contract, the artist (which for a band like Korn is five people), the record label gets 92% and the artist gets 8% (to split between them), but that's only on domestic (US) sales. On international sales the split is worse at 96%/4%. The artist would typically also pay for any damaged product, which mattered more in the case of shellac records as they are more brittle and broke more often.
For a publishing contract there's more variance in the split but it would typically be more like 60/40.
A lot of people seem to be taking a legalistic or moralistic view on this. Along the lines of "copyright works like this" or "people should get credit for what they do".
The economic view would be something like:
- There's a pie to be split, often beforehand. Some players are in better negotiating positions than others. Sadly, if you don't know a lot of performers, you'll have a hard time getting a bigger slice from the one that shows up.
- It's not actually relevant who is on the document as a "writer". This is simply a thing to be negotiated over so that the performer is incentivized to do the recording. It's the same thing as putting up sales tax on a purchaser of goods, legally the buyer is paying x% extra, but economically the buyer and the seller actually split the bill according to negotiating power.
- What will happen if it's enshrined that only the person who actually wrote the piece gets his name on it? Well there will be other things to bargain over. For instance, maybe you get your name exclusively on the song, but you put it in a company and the performer gets a piece of the company.
The writers are trying to affect their negotiating power by introducing a new element into the contract process: social pressure.
Heretofore there's been a gentleman's agreement about writing credits which benefited the artist, and that's largely been enforced by the reality that artists (and publishers) need writers less than writers need them.
But, what does a pop artist in the 21st century need more than anything in order to succeed? Their image on social media. The underlying threat here is the class issues, and the tactical deployment of the gig economy (song writers driving Ubers) was not accidental.
When the word "exploitation" starts getting thrown around, and comparisons to how black artists were treated in the early years of the music industry start getting made, the pressure on artists and their representation will grow, and the dynamics of the contract process will change. That's what the writers are hoping will happen, anyway.
This seems like a reductive view which is based on ignorance of how songwriting royalties work.
Songwriting credit is copyright in the music and lyrics of the song. Artist credit is copyright in a specific recording of a song.
So if you write a song which is a great song, and Arianna Grande records a lackluster version which nobody likes that much, but then several other artists pick up on the fact that it's a great song and record their own highly successful versions, then the songwriter would do very well from this, but Arianna Grande wouldn't share in the later success of the cover versions.
If Arianna gets a 30% writers credit just for putting her own 'vibe' on the original recording, then she participates in the upside of the cover versions, even though they might have been successful despite her rather than because of her.
What surprises me the most is that that shitty "music" you hear nowadays is written by someone. I thought it was made by a computer or something. But if I think about it... it is logical, surely a computer makes better music.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadMore commonly, at some point a different writer is brought in to update it, sometimes heavy rewrites, sometimes just tweaks. Once it gets filmed, the writer's guild has a process of arbitration to determine who gets credit, based on roughly who is believed to have contributed the most original material. The person or persons who are considered the primary creators get residuals based on % of money made (actual money made not the Hollywood accounting bullshit).
They also have very prominent credits, second only to the director (notice it's the second to last in opening credits or second if it's closing credits).
Their biggest issue is all the unpaid work they get asked to do. They can do months and even years of work without any compensation with projects that aren't really moving forward.
The one relationship that immediately springs to mind, when I think of this type of thing, is Elton John and Bernie Taupin.
I understand that they split up for a while, and that Elton John's music lost its lustre during that period.
Although I like some of Elton John's work, I am not enough of a fan to speak in more than a fairly vague sense. I just remember people complaining about it, when it was happening.
Keith Reid was also given top billing, for Procol Harum. He usually showed up in group photos.
I'm sure it's not as cut and dry on every song necessarily but Elton writes the music and Taupin writes the lyrics. Of course EJ performs the songs.
Neither would be what they are without the other, certainly, the same as Lennon and McCartney's solo work was great but didn't come close to their collaboration.
Anyways just want to point out EJ isn't one of the "manufactured" pop artists who had others write his songs for him. He's a true artist and musician in his own right even though Taupin is obviously hugely important to his success.
https://www.amazon.com/Song-Machine-Inside-Hit-Factory/dp/03...
Consider the case of "I Will Always Love You", written and originally performed by Dolly Parton but made globally famous by Whitney Houston. I mean, Parton is a pretty legendary songwriter, but let's be honest, the only reason that song was played over and over on the radio was Houston's voice. When Houston died and the song was again put in rotation on the radio, is it really fair that Parton received all the benefit of that and Houston's estate nothing?
----
Copyright is split into two main sections: copyright in the song (known as publishing rights) and copyright in the sound recording (known as master rights). The publisher only deals with the publishing right, which is the songwriting side and includes the music and lyrics.
Traditionally, a record label will own the master right, which is basically the right to use a particular recording of that song, but if you’re a self-releasing artist or producer then you will most likely own this right yourself.
https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/music-publishing-explained-fo...
That's really not the same thing as "publishers take all the money".
According to a quick Google search, Houston made over $30 million from the Bodyguard soundtrack, and millions more after her death.
It could not have been recorded without Parton.
It is all evil but it kind of shows who has the negotiation leverage. Todays pop music scene is all about creating a celebrity image consumers want to identify with. Once said image is created the actual music is not that important. So the writers do not get much credit.
I've thought about it slightly and without Teddy Park there is no blackpink, but without the individual members each bringing their own flavour to the group, there is no blackpink either.
If you're familiar with the concept art industry, this is essentially just character design but with living people.
We are being fed a story, Katy Perry and Ariana Grande are good examples of this.
Who doesn't consider choir members to be artists?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM51qOpwcIM
I think most people think she falls under this category.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I66oFXdf0KU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3szNvgQxHo
Ariana Grande has written a few of her own songs (though none of these were released as singles).
Perhaps you meant that neither Katy Perry or Ariana Grande are composers (who write the instrumental portion of the song)?
"Kayfabe, in the United States, is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe during a show would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera."
Outside of the entertainment industry, politics is an obvious example, though wikipedia states:
"It has long been claimed that kayfabe has been used in American politics, especially in election campaigns, Congress, and the White House, but no evidence of actual usage of kayfabe in Washington has ever been uncovered. In interviews as Governor of Minnesota, former wrestler Jesse Ventura often likened Washington to wrestling when he said that politicians "pretend to hate each other in public, then go out to dinner together.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe
I find the idea of being fed a story fascinating because a successful story feels more real than life itself and I'm not sure you can separate the two (life and the stories we tell ourselves). Once you can see it for what it is, that it's just a story, it breaks the illusion. But a really powerful story sucks you back in time and time again, and sometimes, you forget that you were being told a story in the first place.
And now after typing the above paragraph I sit wondering how many stories I currently believe are real, are just stories after all. Money being one of the most powerful.
Why do you need to be a writer to get royalties. Would the producers not be able to ask for a royalty regardless?
Many record producers do participate in the songwriting or composition process and are credited for that work (for example, Jay-Z), but the vast majority don't (for example, Glen Wallachs, co-founder of Capital Records).
Production can mean anything and everything from project management, sound design, co-writing, arranging to hands-on instrumental parts - to turning up once a week and saying "Sounds great. Carry on."
The split depends on the producer/artist agreement.
Session musicians don't usually get points even though they may literally write their parts. In publishing terms a song is melody+lyrics, and everything else is work-for-hire arrangement.
This often gets renegotiated because it's clearly nonsense. But that's the starting point.
A producer cannot "negotiate" creative credit if they did not earn it, because the guilds will not allow it.
If a producer wants writing credit, they must earn the writing credit by performing creative activities as specified by the guild rules. Project management and other "producing" activities do not count. Note however that the creative contributions of session musicians under WFH arrangements are generally attributed to their employer--i.e., to the producer, and SCL rules generally apply to determine the creative contribution the producer may claim for the work of session musicians.
Co-writing and arranging are not "producing" activities, they are writing and composition activities which can qualify for songwriting and composing credit. Few producers participate creatively in their songs, but the ones that do tend to be the more famous ones (like Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Dr. Luke, etc.) and are use usually artists in their own right.
Ultimately, I wonder where the money ends up between the artist and the executive.
This article (not the pact's message) seems to be unfairly framing this as writers vs artists, but the real bad guy could be some suit at UMI or EMG...
It sucks for the writers all the same, but don't misplace your anger.
I would not be shocked in the slightest if a few artists are increasingly also starting to throw their weight around and that is gaining some traction and becoming more of a norm as well. Thats also not new, ranging from the inane (no brown m&m's back stage) to stuff like this.
I think a lot of people would be shocked to learn that
1. Many artists dont write their own songs
2. Many bands dont perform in their own studio albums and often use hired guns/session musicians
3. A lot of 1&2 are actually a relatively small number of people with a pretty prodigious output.
People like Max Martin, Ryan Tedder, Sia Furler, Dr. Luke, Bonnie McKee in the current sphere/conversation.
But even going back to Elvis...Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller are the actual writers for Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock etc. And theres some for other Genre's, Motown had their own with Lamont Dozier and Brian and Eddie Holland. Otis Blackwell, Prince Nelson Rogers etc etc.
This revelation happened for me when i started getting into playing music. Over the years I have gained appreciation for those that dont really need to deal with 1 and 2, but that takes a very special type of talent and dedication.
https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9
I see that claim a lot and it's obviously a nice story. But isn't it quite likely that they were just acting like obnoxious rock stars, and they made up the story later when they didn't like being legendary for being assholes anymore? Or are we just taking their word for it?
If true, it is very surprising. Surely in most venues the people responsible for back stage hospitality are not the same people responsible for lighting, electrics, sound installation and stage safety? Isn't it quite likely that one of those teams would have met the requirements perfectly, and the other would have cut corners? How about the situation where extremely professional and scrupulous venues do all the important things right but resent having to sort M&Ms for overpaid stars? Wouldn't it have made more sense for Van Halen to have their own electrical inspectors who would check safety and reliability of the installation? How do other touring rock groups make sure everything is set up correctly? How did Van Halen come up with this particular canary test among all others?
Is it really that conspiratorial that an extremely famous 20 year old acted like a dick, and that at age thirty he made up a story to cover up his youthful dickishness?
> Surely in most venues the people responsible for back stage hospitality are not the same people
They all get paid from the same pool. It's the boss they're testing, not the stage hand.
Does the boss treat every requirement like a requirement and have it done seriously or do they pick and choose based on what they think is important and surprise the artist?
Obviously part of the reason this story gets told a lot is because a lot of people, many of them management consultants who charge by the day for nuggets of catchy wisdom like this one, love the idea that organizations have a homogenous culture and the same ones that skimp on the buffet preparation also skimp on the rigging safety. Actually, this is complete fantasy. It's perfectly believable to think that the same boss makes sure the artists have everything in their dressing room they want, no matter how demanding, but thinks that they won't check the bigger, critical but more expensive stuff.
I didn't ask when people started making up the claim, I asked how the claim was reasonable. The person sorting M&Ms would have been paid just the same. How does a reasonable request become dickish?
> they didn't have any particular preference for non-brown M&Ms but just wanted to mess with the people waiting on them"
Mess with? There's that unsupported judgement again. Am I messing with the cook if I ask for less salt, or no onions on my burger? Or are those valid things for a customer to want? Do I have to prove a medical reason for not wanting onions? Or brown M&Ms?
> management consultants [...] love the idea that organizations have a homogenous culture and the same ones that skimp on the buffet preparation also skimp on the rigging safety.
That's generally true but it doesn't need to be. If it saved them one bad show ever it's worth it. Even if it didn't, if they thought it would it was still probably a safe investment.
I'd be happy if a performer went out of their way to make sure that a live event that I paid for and travelled to attend went off without a hitch. To do otherwise would be dickish.
And two. Most large touring acts have all sorts of heavy equipment. Zepp, Skynyrd had enourmous amounts of stuff. Even to date, RHCP has a boat load of gear they lug around because like many they don’t use a venues PA, they use their own gear because it’s quintessential to their tone. Hell the Grateful Dead had a wall of sound.
All that is to say....sure that could be a reason. May even have been the reasoning to start out. But I’m not sure I buy it personally. That band was also known for their.....persona. Especially with David Lee Roth.
I personally just try to exit the whole system. I love https://freemusicarchive.org/.
I would love it if culture wasn't driven by pure profit and homogenized into bland predictability.
FMA also provides a way to donate directly to artists.
The song has topped numerous charts, for instance Pitchfork and Rolling Stone's best song of 2020. Why wouldn't they want to take credit?
I don't think it's fair to the people involved to paint it something it's not just because the sexual language makes you uncomfortable.
"Hoes in this house" for example.
Sex is natural, calling women whores is not. One is a fine thing for a kid to see, the other is problematic and requires you to explain that their language shouldn't be repeated, that it's probably indicative of depression or systematic oppression of women, etc.
Nothing in the song appears to be feminine empowerment as they defend it by saying - it's just soft-core porn masquerading as music. Porn is porn and when made without harm is a lifestyle choice, it's the masquerade that makes it icky.
Not the scantily clad ladies dry-humping. But that they look like they're doing it for the male gaze, as they stare into the camera instead of each other's eyes.
I guess it feels like what you'd get if you tried to have a three-way with two hookers. Hollow and depressing.
On the one hand I can see the harm it can make by normalizing the stigma that women need to do things for the pleasure of men, but on the other hand I'm not sure preventing them from doing that would help the issue at all. It's a complex subject for sure.
I'm just trying to answer your question from a few posts back about what I found distasteful. The best summary I can come up with is 'women trying to act like whores to be attractive'.
Maybe that's not how it is for Cardi, and that's her image of healthy sexuality, but I wouldn't show it to my kids or my lover.
As an aside, I realized that I watched the grammy performance which may not be the same as the music video.
I don't think there's a reason that doesn't circle back to my original assessment of the guy.
And was this the first song that was "amazingly vulgar" or "inappropriate for most conversations"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee
Performed by
Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion
Written by
Austin Owens, Belcalis Almanzar, Frank Rodriguez, James Foye iii, Jordan Thorpe, Megan Pete
Produced by
Ayo & Keyz
We can compare this to a Kpop song called IDEA that 2 of the same people who wrote WAP worked on
Performed by
Taemin
Written by
Adrian Mckinnon, Austin Owens, James Foye iii, Jimmy Claeson, Moon Seol Ree, Tay Jasper
Western stars are extremely dishonest about their input into their music.
Korean TV giving credit to the songwriters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4wOjOEcRZg
https://www.complex.com/music/2012/08/the-nas-controversy-an...
That's why the WAP songwriters are the rappers (Megan thee Stallion and Cardi B), the producers (Ayo N Keyz), and the songwriter of the sampled track (Frank Ski). Many other genres do not have this kind of expectation.
If you are accusing the WAP songwriters of employing ghostwriters, that is a severe allegation and needs evidence to be taken seriously.
Are you saying that the song writers should give their work away for free?
The credit is tied to the method the song writers use to be paid for their work. This is coupled to pay. When an artist puts their name on the song lyrics they are taking pay from the people who wrote the lyrics.
They have been paid already, byt fame is for the artist, have ypu been living under a rock? Do I need to draw?
Song-writers get paid poorly because there is more supply of pop songs than demand for them. Taylor Swift's grocery store doesn't get a cut of her revenue because Taylor Swift could easily just switch to another grocery store. The same as she could easily switch to another song-writer (or write her own songs).
Why doesn't an orchestra just start jamming, with no score or sheet music? It's just notes on paper.
Why don't construction workers show up on a jobsite and start hammering without waiting for plans? It's just lines on paper.
Why don't...you get the idea.
Why don't screenwriters just film their own movies? Why don't composers just form their own orchestras? Why don't architects just build their own skyscrapers?
The screenwriter example should make it obvious why these song-writers' complaints are baseless. A movie filmed by amateur videographers with no editing experience, no acting talent, and no marketing is not going to achieve mainstream success no matter how good the writing is. Meanwhile movies with terrible writing rake in huge numbers at the box office just because they have big name actors and top-of-the-line production quality (ex: the Avengers). This is because the script isn't particularly important to the success of the movie. Hence why the script writer doesn't get paid a large percentage of royalties.
If the quality of song-writing was a key determinant in the success of a song, the song-writers would have leverage to negotiate better royalties. But it isn't, so they don't. If you don't like it, stop listening to pop music. There are plenty of struggling artists playing their own compositions in dive bars on friday nights that would love your support.
You sure it's just that? All the DC superhero movies also have big name actors, top-of-the-line production quality, heavy marketing and merchandise tie-ins. Yet those movies have been largely duds. They don't have the same resonance in contemporary popular culture as the Marvel movies. Or ratings by moviegoers and film critics. They're generally considered dour, stodgy, weirdly paced, illogical, or lacking soul.
The scripts for the MCU movies won't win any film awards with the "ivory tower film snob"-type of moviegoer. But they're outstanding examples of the craft of screenwriting for their genre. And I'm speaking as someone who generally finds superhero movies and comic books, including the Marvel ones, kinda tedious. I don't listen to pop music either.
The MCU movies have wit, humor, sentiment, perfect pacing, and a tone appropriate to the characters (Guardians of the Galaxy movies are silly and playful, Captain America movies are more serious, Thor movies have an epic/Shakespearean feel). They do a good job of staying faithful to the source material while still being comprehensible to casual watchers. You think elves do all that? It takes serious writing skill, and every screenwriter isn't capable of it.
> A movie filmed by amateur videographers with no editing experience, no acting talent, and no marketing is not going to achieve mainstream success no matter how good the writing is.
"Professional movie-making requires multiple specialists" is not breaking news to anyone. The topic of discussion here is one of the specialists don't want to share credit with people who weren't involved in their work. Would it be OK if an actor demanded a makeup artist credit because they ran a comb through their own hair on set once?
- Without writers/composers the artists would have nothing to perform. It goes both ways.
- They’re not asking for all the revenue. They’re asking to be fairly paid for their portion of the writing. The artists still get their portion, as does the label, etc. They’re also asking artists to not take credit for writing that they did not do.
I think the complaint is that they aren't being paid "adequately", but without actual numbers it's hard to tell. I suspect few of them are making SV developer salaries.
Seems like someone didn't read the article...
What a time to be alive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Btw the opposite side thinks that HN is dominated by your side (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
I strongly support distribution of profits in the relation to the value being created. While it is absolutely possible, even commonplace, for organizations to exploit their workers and other smaller orgs, I also suspect that value in "hit" songs is created elsewhere: in production, marketing, name recognition of the singer, etc.
In my view the same thing should apply to songwriting. The current standard is, you wrote a song if you wrote the melody or the words. Sometimes those are two different people.
If you added value in other ways, add your name to some other contract specifying distribution of proceeds.
The songwriting is extremely valuable, otherwise just write your own damn songs.
As an aside, "inherent value" is a mushy concept that seems to defy any meaningful description.
The songwriting is extremely valuable, otherwise just write your own damn songs.
If it's so valuable, how can these companies find "hit" writers for £100 a piece? While it is entirely possible for something of immense artistic or technical value to not be priced commensurately on the market, I've heard these songs, this is not the case here.
Fundamentally, this is happening because the quality of the song-writing isn't really all that important to the success of a pop star. Marketing, production quality, and sex appeal are more important. It's really not that hard to write a 4-chord song about breaking up with your boyfriend.
If song-writers think they should be getting rich off these popular songs, there is nothing stopping them from performing the song themselves. They don't do that though because they know they'll make more money letting Taylor Swift sing it.
How many hit songs use the same I-V-vi-IV progression? It works is why but it isn’t interesting to a discerning listener.
It seems like a lot of pop music is more like fashion than music. Image leads and after removing the stylistic facade you see the same underlying infrastructure. There are exceptions to the rule of course.
Nirvana was an interesting pop music band because many of their songs used weird progressions. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” shouldn’t work according to therory, but it obviously does.
And then of course how pop music is mixed and mastered today. Almost no dynamic range because of the “loudness wars”.
I also believe there's artistic value in music that understands it's just ear-candy and doesn't try to be something else. In a world where so many people are trying to score a hit with the same chord progression for example, the ones that succeed stand out in other factors, and in my opinion it doesn't matter if it's some catchy verse on the refrain or something about the performer like Lady Gaga's provocative performances back in the early 2010s.
What’s great about modern info tech is it makes it easier to explore artists of your youth that you never knew about. You can get really deep which makes it feel like now music is still being made for you.
It isn’t like there aren’t infinite other styles for people that want it. Jazz is a great example of “musicians music” - lots of interesting ideas get explored there and dissonance is used which you rarely find in pop.
They actually have software that helps crank out hits nowadays. It’s an interesting time to be a songwriter in Nashville.
Plenty of interesting music flies under the radar. Even without the massive marketing push some artists get, the same artists would still rise to the top producing familiar song structures the average listener can recognize.
I fully support artists getting as much of the live performance/merch/appearances money as they can. If they did not write a song they should not be getting paid for songwriting. All of the justifications in the article dating back to Elvis Presley show how long the business has been slimy.
...and programming pays better, anyhow.
One time he gave us a hard time about not being able to meet at any point except his lunch-hour. So we're all on Eastern Time at 3pm during the workday and he's on zoom...eating a sandwich as we spoke. So we gave up, we didnt even include him on any conversations because it was negative value.
In speaking with other students, 5-10% of the graduating class were complete free riders. Some were sponsored (e.g., federal government employees, etc) and were not only free-riders in terms of work, but also in terms of cost. Further, when graded your team got graded based on how many people you had, which many of us spoke up against especially given randomly assigned groups.
That said, some of my randomly assigned teammates were awesome, we're still friends, we formed great bonds and I wouldnt want to miss that experience.
Because someone had to come in last place, it eased a lot of the tension and created a much more pleasant group dynamic:
- The free-rider(s) were perfectly okay with jumping on the grenade, filling the last-place spot, and knocking 20% off their final grade in exchange for doing very little work and still passing the class.
- The lazier people who did care about their grade were a bit more motivated to contribute than they otherwise would've been.
- The go-getters who wanted to ace the class felt like they were fairly compensated for doing most of the heavy lifting.
What does "write the song" mean though? You hear lots of remix and cover versions of famous songs which are obviously derivative works, but what if that happens before the song is ever published? What if a song writer creates a song specifically for an artist? Do these stylistic influences count for writing credit? The line is not well defined.
As for remixes and covers, I'd say that if there was a change made that significantly altered or changed the song, it would be considered involvement. It seems that from the article, remixing or changing the song to the point where you would consider it substantially different is enough for a share of publishing revenues.
Bottom line is that while it's still subjective, most musicians and songwriters would have no trouble recognizing if someone else had a substantial impact on the final product.
The lyrics were never used. Because the lyrics were never supposed to be used.
Yup, just to be clear in that case, if you are writing about the characters JKR created, with their attributes, personas, and/or backstories, you are fully expected to license the characters and pay royalties to JKR. You are specifically utilizing her copyrighted works for profit, even if you don't use a single line of pre-existing dialogue.
This is why we don't have a million non-Disney Mickey Mouse stories, media, videos, etc. - Disney owns the copyright on not only the specific prior works but also the characters.
No question, influence and creative origin count, and should be compensated.
No royalty paid.
That is like saying: "I just drove by a cop at 3mph over the speed limit and he didn't even turn on his lights. No fine paid." (implying that therefore speed limit laws don't exist)
The fact that many trivial violations go un-prosecuted never invalidates the law.
Here's a key line just a few paragraphs into a Georgetown Law paper on the topic [1] >>Many entertainment corporation shave left fan fiction alone, but a few have attempted and are attempting to stamp out unauthorized use of their proprietary characters.
It is very common. Your trivial "example" may come under fair use, but that says nothing about the actual facts of the matter.
[1] https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
This page has a reasonably accessible description of who does what and why they get paid: https://www.openmicuk.co.uk/advice/music-royalties-explained...
I like this typo.
Immoral: "an agent doing or thinking something they know or believe to be wrong."
"You don't have to put out the red light"
The entire system seems incredibly open to bad faith abuse.
But I can't confidently name a single songwriter from the last 50 years, aside from the ones that were predominantly popular performers and recorded-music artists (Roger Waters, Lennon/McCartney, James Taylor).
To me, not knowing any better, this suggests that songwriters had more economic self-determination within the music industry, which translates into influence and cachet, in the 1920s than they do in the 2020s.
Today, again as an outsider, it seems like publishers and managers have an outsized influence, because they control the economics more than any other entity in the system.
Leiber and Stoller, Ashford and Simpson, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, Rod Temperton, Diane Warren, Desmond Child, and Max Martin are well known songwriters from more modern times.
However, their hits are much better known than they are, compared to the great American songbook guys. Although there are other very successful songwriters from that era with less name recongnition, for example, Johnny Mercer or Harry Warren.
For example Quentin Miller here wrote tons of songs for Drake. https://genius.com/artists/Quentin-miller
Ghost producing is also a thing, I've heard stories of a producer getting $700 or $600 for fairly popular track because the the actual song is credited to someone else.
Hell, in hip hop it's not unheard of for bigger artist to outright steal ideas and concepts from underground artists. Then you can remake the song as your own, and if you decide to reach back and compensate the original artist that's okay but as far as I can tell you'll very rarely get into legal trouble.
Case in point
https://www.bet.com/music/2018/06/26/childish-gambino-this-i...
It's so easy to become successful if you just steal ideas from people
Next there is the mechanical royalties that come from radio play, streaming, licensing agreements, etc. Those largely go to the owner of the composition(e.g. songwriter) from 25% up to 90ish percent depending on the publishing deal.
The live performance aspect is where the artist can rake it in if they play things smart. The live show largely goes to the artist(*as long as there is not a 360 deal in place*) They can charge what they can get, and sell merch at the show. If they produce their own merch they can probably net a nice profit. If they let a merch company "handle it for them" they will see 10 cents on the dollar or less. Artists can get into trouble if they make their shows too big and would only break even/run at a loss.
360 deals are a particularly insidious anti artist beast. Basically the label throws their might behind the artist and gets a large cut of ALL aspects of the money they make being an artist.(live shows,merch, everything) I suspect many of the big names at least start out in a 360 deal these days, and may have negotiating power once they become Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga or Ariana Grande.
Songwriters probably have the least negotiating power in this situation. When an artist has 50 songwriting teams throwing tracks their way, a suboptimal deal may have to be accepted just to have a shot at making the album. While I am not saying songwriting is not a talent(it most certainly is), unfortunately more people have said talent than there are A-List stars.
Equally important is the fact that a share of publishing means a share of all sorts of royalties which aren't negotiated case by case. For example for playing the song on the radio, in restaurants, on TV shows, etc. But even more insidiously, it applies to cover versions. So if Elvis Presley gets a 50% songwriting credit, he will then take 50% of the portion due to the songwriter on any version recorded or played live by anyone (who hasn't added the 'Presley magic'), at any time in the future.
Someone told me "Taylor Swift writes her own songs." Sure, but when you look at the songwriters on 1989, over half of them were at least co-written by the song writer with the most #1 hits after McCartney and Lennon.
Haha. "Some". I think if we dove deeper we'll find that number shockingly close to zero.
Trying to infer whether on not Taylor Swift writes her own songs based on consistent collaborators seems odd to me.
She has included song-writing voice memos that show the progression of how she wrote certain songs on 1989 and the documentary “Miss Americana” clearly shows her songwriting process (as does this collection of clips from an AT&T promo she did for Reputation https://youtu.be/I4WlSnWtkt8).
Liz Rose, who co-wrote some of Swift's earlier songs (including the much-loved, “All Too Well”), described the process of working with her as editing [1], something all of her other collaborators have said too.
There are a lot of pop stars who get a writing credit for doing very little on a track but Taylor Swift isn’t one of them. If anything, she’s been quite clear that her success is directly tied to her songwriting. Her voice alone (especially as a teenager) wouldn’t have made her a star. It was her songs, paired with her voice and her personality that made everything work.
[1]: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bp/swift-collaboration--...
Not everyone agrees with that estimation
Vocal Coach reacts to Neil Young - Old Man (Live)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppSF6JpdaKQ
Neil Young "Old Man" REACTION & ANALYSIS by Vocal Coach / Opera Singer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trE7YifD9Jc
Compare his voice to that of, say, A-ha's lead singer. Now that guy has a voice. The same with the lead singer of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
One reason Neil Young appeals to me is because he has an unremarkable voice yet succeeded anyway. Yah gotta respect that.
I remember when Stevie Nicks burst on the scene. All the reviews were she had a lousy, raspy voice that nobody would like. But she soon won everyone over :-)
Not everyone would agree with that estimation.
May 19, 2019 CONCERT REVIEW: Neil Young's entrancing night at The Fox
https://www.inlander.com/spokane/concert-review-neil-youngs-...
Of course, it's my favorite NY song, too.
I swear I'm not a music snob. 6 months ago when I heard this batch of songs the first time, I thought some of them were pretty catchy. Although I don't know that anyone will argue this was a great year for music. But I heard that "go out with a bang" song at least 4 times yesterday. About a week ago, I finally listened to the lyrics and started to like it a little. Then I heard it 20 more times and I'm over it.
- This is an issue due to music labels being unable or unwilling to take risks.
- Regardless if you like the music or not, people need to be fairly paid for their work. Musicians/Labels should not be strong-arming/bullying songwriters into taking credit for their work (and thus receiving royalties for work they did not do).
2020 was a great year for music, but not if you only listen to the radio...
I don't listen to the radio on my own time. I've just been working with guys who cycle through 3 stations that all play the exact same songs.
One possible solution is to see if there are independently-run stations in your area. I live near a university, so there is a student-run station that explicitly is not allowed to play top-charting songs. So I get some good music discovery, and awkward banter from new djs. If you have access to a computer, then you have access to basically any station. soma.fm is pretty good.
It definitely is frustrating to see the same songs on the radio over and over, but that's really an issue from iHeartRadio (formerly Clear Channel) owning stations across the country. Boycott iHeartRadio if you can.
These two coworkers, actually, are excellent. I love working with them. Just their music choice for work is horrible. I'm pretty lucky that the only things I have to complain about here are the hours and background music.
(I used to work in an office doing web development with music on all day. Didn't mind it then. Now I work at home in silence.)
https://pipedown.org.uk/ this is a worthy campaign.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28789721-the-song-machin...
"Hit songwriters ask pop stars to stop taking credit for songs they didn't write"
... makes me think of this Don Draper quote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77Y6CIyyBcI
Now anyone can record high quality music at home. Anyone can self publish their music for the world to enjoy. Both were unthinkable a few decades ago.
But there are still a few gatekeepers, and gatekeepers will usually charge for opening their gate. Why wouldn't they?
A megastar can choose to record any of dozens of equally good songs. Whoever they choose will sell 100x more. So in one sense it's fair they get a share of the money they create by adding their fame and talent to the song.
The question is if performers should get songwriting royalties for songs they didn't write.
I don't think this is actually true, at least if you define "good" as "likely to be a hit". There's a reason top pop performers go for songs written by songwriters with a proven track record, the most famous of which is perhaps Max Martin. Not anyone can write (and produce) songs that consistently appeal to whatever the public preferences of the day are. And no one wants to take unnecessary risks.
Eh, to an extent. Audio production is a highly involved process. Few people have the equipment and knowledge to mic instruments & track sound properly, mix audio properly, apply professional-level production, master the tracks properly, master the album properly... It's not as easy as having a computer and some software.
You can get a pretty good sound at home now for sure but for professional albums you still need a decent professional studio. And even at home, getting good mics and hardware is still quite costly.
"A megastar can choose to record any of dozens of equally good songs."
There are famous or well-known (in the industry) songwriters that get chosen time and time again because they can consistently produce hits.
A few decades ago, even the greatest talents in the world needed a recording contract to reach a large audience, and that went through a few large companies.
Today that still helps to get the best equipment and the best people working on your stuff. But you can also record in a home studio with better tech than The Beatles ever had access to.
Not a flat playing field at all, but I think a fair amount of people do come up that way.
As for the best songwriters... I don't really know the business, and I don't want to pretend to. You're probably right for the Megahits. Maybe I'm right for the filler tracks?
Ah yeah, this I do agree with. With today's tech it's relatively easy to get youtube/soundcloud-grade quality. It's not super cheap but one can get by with a decent camera, a decent usb interface like a scarlett 2i2, and a mic or two depending on the instrument.
It's never been easier to get discovered thanks to soundcloud, youtube, instagram, etc. Very different from having to play gigs at the right places (sometimes for a long time!) and hope one gets discovered by someone there. I was thinking more of professional studio albums.
Sufficient for a pro album ready for radio play? Probably not. But good enough to monetize on youtube? All day long.
I'm not saying that its right, only we always want to simplify things that aren't really simple.
Here's how it was when I studied this 15 years ago.
In a traditional big four record contract, the artist (which for a band like Korn is five people), the record label gets 92% and the artist gets 8% (to split between them), but that's only on domestic (US) sales. On international sales the split is worse at 96%/4%. The artist would typically also pay for any damaged product, which mattered more in the case of shellac records as they are more brittle and broke more often.
For a publishing contract there's more variance in the split but it would typically be more like 60/40.
The economic view would be something like:
- There's a pie to be split, often beforehand. Some players are in better negotiating positions than others. Sadly, if you don't know a lot of performers, you'll have a hard time getting a bigger slice from the one that shows up.
- It's not actually relevant who is on the document as a "writer". This is simply a thing to be negotiated over so that the performer is incentivized to do the recording. It's the same thing as putting up sales tax on a purchaser of goods, legally the buyer is paying x% extra, but economically the buyer and the seller actually split the bill according to negotiating power.
- What will happen if it's enshrined that only the person who actually wrote the piece gets his name on it? Well there will be other things to bargain over. For instance, maybe you get your name exclusively on the song, but you put it in a company and the performer gets a piece of the company.
Heretofore there's been a gentleman's agreement about writing credits which benefited the artist, and that's largely been enforced by the reality that artists (and publishers) need writers less than writers need them.
But, what does a pop artist in the 21st century need more than anything in order to succeed? Their image on social media. The underlying threat here is the class issues, and the tactical deployment of the gig economy (song writers driving Ubers) was not accidental.
When the word "exploitation" starts getting thrown around, and comparisons to how black artists were treated in the early years of the music industry start getting made, the pressure on artists and their representation will grow, and the dynamics of the contract process will change. That's what the writers are hoping will happen, anyway.
Songwriting credit is copyright in the music and lyrics of the song. Artist credit is copyright in a specific recording of a song.
So if you write a song which is a great song, and Arianna Grande records a lackluster version which nobody likes that much, but then several other artists pick up on the fact that it's a great song and record their own highly successful versions, then the songwriter would do very well from this, but Arianna Grande wouldn't share in the later success of the cover versions.
If Arianna gets a 30% writers credit just for putting her own 'vibe' on the original recording, then she participates in the upside of the cover versions, even though they might have been successful despite her rather than because of her.
It never made me feel less accomplished to admit when I didn't write something.
That said, most of the time people just assume I wrote them all, unless they recognize the cover's original.