The Constitution of the United States guarantees creators the right to control their own intellectual property. However, AM/FM radio seems to be the final content landscape where these constitutional rights are rendered null and void on a practical scale.
Read More: https://www.grammy.com/advocacy/news/2021-congress-side-with-music-creators-big-radio
On the surface, Disney and Sony Pictures Entertainment seem to be two studios heading in opposite directions when it comes to business strategy.
Disney is investing huge sums of money and resources into building direct-to-consumer streaming platforms. Sony Pictures has vowed to stay on its traditional studio path, dealing high-end content to the highest bidders. But the two companies found common ground in a massive U.S. movie licensing deal that was more than a year in the making for Sony.
Read More: https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/disney-sony-marvel-spider-man-deal-1234962589/
For years we have seen massive encroachments on our artistic freedoms in favor of globally operating digital corporations. This anti-artist prioritization is also reflected in the federal government’s current draft law on the new copyright law.
The NFT sale of Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s Free Comb with Pagoda has been pulled from OpenSea after his estate clarified that it will still retain the drawing’s license and rights.
Actors’ Equity Association has concluded its first-ever convention, from April 25 to 27.
Because it is not yet safe to convene in person, the delegates met remotely to recommend policy for the future of the union in accordance with the convention’s theme: “Equity: Solidarity in a New Era,” as well as to attend breakout sessions to learn more as member leaders and hear from guest speakers.
A new finance company targeting the music industry unveiled its services earlier this week, with former AIM chief Alison Wenham and veteran artist manager Tim Clark among its advisors.
In the latest blockbuster music-catalog deal, Downtown has sold its 145,000 owned and co-published copyrights to an affiliate of the Concord music company. Included in the deal are songs popularized by Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Marvin Gaye, Mötley Crüe, New Order, Stevie Wonder, The 1975 and others, such as “Green Onions,” “Dancing In the Streets,” “Home Sweet Home,” “Moves Like Jagger,” “Halo,” “Stay With Me” and “Shallow.” Also included in the deal were a substantial number of J-pop and K-pop songs, as well as French hits.
Read More: https://variety.com/2021/music/news/downtown-sells-copyrights-concord-million-1234953780/
Judge Aleta A. Trauger has denied the HFA’s motion to dismiss the copyright infringement lawsuit it’s facing from Eminem publisher Eight Mile Style – while also determining that the Blackstone Group-owned company cannot be held liable for vicarious copyright infringement in this instance.
Judge Trauger just recently ruled on the Harry Fox Agency’s motion to dismiss the much-publicized complaint from Eight Mile Style, which has accused the New York City-based entity of both vicarious and contributory copyright infringement.
An alliance of trade groups representing the copyright industries – including the music business – has called on the European Union to beef up an element of its proposed Digital Services Act that would obligate internet companies to do more to confirm the identity of their business customers.
In a single announcement in February this year, Spotify effectively doubled the number of markets it is live in – leaping from 85 countries to 178 and calling it its “broadest market expansion to date”. It also said that it was adding 36 languages to its platform to reflect its increasingly international remit where it could now potentially reach over 1 billion people (equal to an eighth of the world’s population).
High-profile artists including Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, The Who’s Roger Daltrey, and Coldplay’s Chris Martin have called on the UK government to implement far-reaching reforms in the music-streaming space.
The formal demand for streaming reform arrived in the form of an open letter (spearheaded by the Musicians’ Union and the Broken Record campaign) as well as a petition, both of which were addressed to Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Netflix revealed that it will spend over $17 billion on content this year, according to its first-quarter earnings report.
“As we’ve noted previously, the production delays from Covid-19 in 2020 will lead to a 2021 slate that is more heavily second half weighted with a large number of returning franchises,” said the company in its letter to shareholders. “And while the roll out of vaccines is very uneven across the world, we are back up and producing safely in every major market, with the exception of Brazil and India. Assuming this continues, we’ll spend over $17 billion in cash on content this year and we’ll continue to deliver an amazing range of titles for our members with more originals this year than last.”
Read More: https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/netflix-2021-content-spend-17-billion-1234955953/
During a quarterly earnings interview, Fidelity’s Nidhi Gupta asked the company’s top executives about their recent strategy to test blocking users who are suspected of using other people’s passwords. Specifically, Gupta asked about the size of the opportunity to increase the company’s revenue with the effort and why now is the right time to start “tightening the screws on that.”
Jonathan Taplin wasn’t present at the creation, but in rock & roll terms, he came close enough. He witnessed Bob Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival, saw Jimi Hendrix and many others at Monterey Pop, flew into Woodstock while working for the Band, helped coordinate George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, and was aboard the famous Festival Express, during which the Band, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and others rode a train around Canada, playing concerts along the way.
Apple Music caused furore on Friday (April 16) when it made some proud claims about its payouts to artists and songwriters – and, by association, some potentially damning claims about Spotify‘s equivalent distributions.
Those claims all appeared in an email newsletter sent by Apple to the industry and artist community. This newsletter has now been obtained by MBW and is re-published below.
The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) has announced the completion of its first-ever monthly distribution of mechanical royalties. The organization’s distribution – its first connected with the new blanket license established by the Music Modernization Act of 2018 (MMA) – included royalties from the use of musical works by U.S. digital service providers (DSPs) during January 2021. It did not include any historical unmatched royalties.
Read More: https://themlc.com/press/mechanical-licensing-collective-completes-first-royalty-distribution
This submission focuses primarily on the inquiry’s third question, i.e. the economic impact and long-term implications of streaming on the music industry, in particular how the shift to streaming has exacerbated long-term issues within the music industry.
This submission will highlight issues around transparency regarding the deals done between the music industry and the streaming platforms and social media services. This means artists, songwriters and their managers are unable to audit the royalties those deals generate, and do not know how advance payments are shared out between stakeholders.
Read More: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/15289/html/?mc_cid=b433e0feea&mc_eid=9e47683264
Cast your mind back to the spring of 1974, if indeed you were around to remember those days.
The UK is hosting the Eurovision Song Contest, and the word on the street around the event’s venue the Brighton Dome is that their representative Olivia Newton John has a fair old chance of winning.
Victory for her track Long Live Love would give the Brits their third victory in the kitschy-cool international song contest, which began in 1956.
Read More: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56743279
It’s the song, not the album, that rules modern pop – but payment for writers is dysfunctional at best. We urgently need a new model
The writers of the original “Predator” movie and Disney’s 20th Century Fox Film Corp have filed dueling lawsuits in California federal courts over the writers’ move to reclaim Disney’s copyright in their screenplay.
Read More: https://www.reuters.com/article/ip-disney-predator-idUSL1N2M9215
After half a decade of streaming-driven growth the global music business hit a speed bump in the shape of the pandemic. Live music stopped in an instant, radio boomed then dipped and physical sales plummeted as stores closed. The music business will recover, but this enforced slowdown has had an important, unintended consequence: artists and songwriters have had to adjust to often dramatic falls in income – a light has been shone on music royalties.
Read More: https://www.midiaresearch.com/reports/rebalancing-the-song-economy
Iron Maiden have hit back at a lawsuit filed by US-based e-commerce platform Viral Style that accuses one of the metal band’s companies of grabbing $200,000 from its PayPal account without permission in an act that was, it alleged, “akin to a high-tech and sophisticated bank robbery”. Legal reps for the metal band argue that the litigation should not have been filed with a court in Florida, and that Viral Style has failed “to state a claim for which relief may be granted”.
Early Friday, Apple Music sent a carefully worded letter to artists, music labels and publishers that briefly explained “how creators earn royalties” from the streaming service, which is the world’s second-largest, behind Spotify. The letter, which was not sent to the media, was obtained by the Wall Street Journal, which published a report that was not inaccurate but, since it was the only reliable source of the news for media outlets, was often inaccurately re-reported — most frequently in multiple headlines stating that Apple Music pays twice as much per stream as Spotify.
Read More: https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/apple-music-pays-twice-stream-spotify-1234953590/
As you may be aware, The MLC recently received $424 million as payment of the “inception to date” unmatched mechanical royalties held at a number of streaming platforms, sometimes called the “black box.” Why do we have a black box at all? For the same reason you have “pending and unmatched” at record companies–somebody decided to exploit the recording without clearing the song.
Read More: https://musictechpolicy.com/2021/04/16/what-the-mlc-can-learn-from-orphan-works/
Ask any executive what the music business was like in the ’00s and their face may take on an expression more commonly associated with narrowly averted disasters like car accidents or, more accurately, attempted robberies. Due to peer-to-peer file-sharing platforms like Napster and Limewire, U.S. recorded-music revenues lost more than half their value in the early years of the 21st century, falling precipitously from an all-time high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.7 billion in 2014 and 2015 (according to the RIAA) as songs transitioned from being sold on a physical object like a CD or vinyl to becoming a sound file that could be easily — and illegally — distributed for free. Piracy ran rampant as the music industry failed to come to grips with how quickly and drastically its world had changed. While iTunes brought some stability to a business model in freefall, in essence an entire generation grew up believing that it didn’t have to pay for music.
The news that the Arclight Cinemas are closing permanently — part of the larger closure that includes Pacific Theaters in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic — hit the film industry, and the greater Los Angeles community, like a shockwave.
Filmmaker John August was one of the first to tweet about the news: “Oh no. ArcLight Hollywood is my favorite place to see movies.”
Read More: https://variety.com/2021/film/news/arclight-cinemas-closure-la-movie-lovers-in-mourning-1234949843/
Stars including Naomie Harris and Ruth Wilson have backed calls for digital body doubles not to be used in films and TV shows to make sex scenes even more explicit than actors originally agreed.
New industry guidelines, drawn up by Time’s Up campaign group, have included additional rules about the use of CGI nudity in a bid to ensure actors are at ease when it comes to filming intimate scenes.
“We should send a thank you note to the Bob Dylan folks,” says Charles “Jeff” Biederman, partner at law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which has a thriving music practice. “The day Dylan happened, I must have gotten four calls that morning,” he adds, referring to Universal Music Publishing Group’s December announcement of a deal to buy Dylan’s entire songwriting catalog for what some said was $300 million — thought to be a record price for the acquisition of a songwriter’s publishing rights.
Read More: https://variety.com/2021/music/news/music-catalog-publishing-sales-advisor-1234946214/
Data is commonly referred to in the music business as “the new oil”. It is a neat analogy to a point – explaining its huge value as well as the fact that it ensures the industry machine keeps running smoothly and does not rust up. But data, just like oil, needs to be controlled when a new source is struck otherwise it becomes a blowout, pumping out in huge plumes. In the oil industry, such uncontrolled/uncontrollable gushers are referred to as “wild wells”.
Read More: https://www.synchtank.com/blog/drowning-in-data-a-wake-up-call-for-the-music-industry/
A copyright lawsuit alleging Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water ripped off a Pulitzer Prize-winning author has been dismissed.
The lawsuit – which was originally filed in February 2018 ahead of the Oscar voting deadline – claimed that the film infringed on the work of author Paul Zindel.
In a statement issued today on the U.S. Supreme Court’s April 5 decision in the Google v. Oracle case, in which the Court ruled 6–2 that Google’s copying of Oracle’s Java code was permissible under the fair use doctrine, Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid stated the following:
Minor mistakes and oversights frequently have a material impact on artists’ careers, particularly when it comes to royalties. But creators can quickly remedy the underlying issues – and bolster their earnings – when equipped with the right information.
The 31-year-old pop star will again make headlines this week when she launches Fearless (Taylor’s Version), a newly recorded take of the mega-successful album that catapulted her to stardom. The project is a culmination of a multi-year battle in which Swift claims she was “stripped of [her] life’s work,” when her former label, Big Machine, along with the master recordings to her first six albums, were sold to powerful music executive (and Swift’s sworn enemy), Scooter Braun.
In a closely watched case about computer code, Justice Stephen Breyer warns that copyright enforcement can sometimes lead to “harm to the public” by impeding creativity and stopping innovative applications.
Actors’ Equity released new guidelines Friday for productions that have fully vaccinated workforces.
Among the new guidelines is the requirement for a COVID-19 safety officer, weekly COVID-19 testing for cast members, provided provisions, housing and compensation for those who test positive for COVID and daily sanitization of the theater. The guidelines come after the union faced an uproar from some members, as well as producers over a previous set of guidelines that were seen as too restrictive and costly.
