This one was presented at the 2011 Pop Conference. David Lowery, who also presented that year, suggested that reluctance to license music to commercials was mostly about class, as you have to be pretty privileged in the first place to turn down money. That didn’t make me feel much better, but another thing he told me sure did: he’d spent time as a quant for some investment firm, and he said the traders there had a very unique take on being an unrecouped band. “That means you won!” they told him, when he explained how major label contracts tended to work. The way they looked at it, being unrecouped was less a mark of failure than of getting the better end of a transaction.

The closest my band, Too Much Joy, ever came to breaking up was in 1991, as we argued about whether we should accept a lucrative offer to record a radio jingle for Budweiser, which I personally considered the second worst beer in America.

The argument began in our manager’s office. My position was not nuanced: commercials were antithetical to every reason we’d formed our rock band in the first place. This was debased, and rock bands – especially indie rock bands — needed to be pure. Continue reading →

My second Pop Conference presentation, from 2003. The audio from this one is still available at KEXP. I believe E. Michael Harrington was on the same panel, with a proposal for a much more sane sample clearance apparatus in which any sampled entities would automatically split a % of the song’s earnings, sampled works would have to have been in the market at least 5 years, and samples would have to be under 10 seconds. Seems like a reasonable set of conditions to me.

I Was Going To Title This Paper “Been Caught Stealing,” But Warner Wanted Five Grand And Perry Farrell’s Publisher Demanded 50% Of Any Money It Ever Made: Why All Artists Should Be Horrified By Sample Clearance Practices

I’m going to talk about sampling from the artist’s perspective. Actually, I guess, there are two artist perspectives: there’s the one of the artist doing the sampling, and there’s the one of the artist being sampled. Although almost everything I say is going to describe the view of a sampler rather than a samplee, I really don’t think there’s any serious difference between the two, and I hope by the time I’m done you’ll understand why that’s so. Although the sampling battles that make it as far as court are often reported and debated as though they pit the interests of two artists against one another, that’s a gross oversimplification. Sampling disputes always represent a conflict between the rights and needs of an artist and the rights and needs of a copyright owner, and that’s a very important distinction for two reasons. Reason number 1 is that the copyright owner usually isn’t an artist, but a corporation that has amassed its market power by convincing as many artists as possible to transfer their copyrights to the corporation. Reason number 2 is that even when the copyright owner actually is an artist, he almost never talks like one while he’s pursuing a copyright infringement case. Continue reading →