WE NEED TO GET PAID - PART 3

In the previous segment I spoke about how producers and beatmakers are able to get paid regardless of whether or not the song makes it onto radio. However, when it comes to songwriters or lyricists, they seem to get the short end of the stick.

In my opinion the songwriters in Cape Town, if not the rest of South Africa, get screwed over the most in the music industry.

As a songwriter, you spend as much time, if not more (or less) writing to the music that was made. The time spent is irrelevant. The fact is that you spent time and provided a service. So why is it that the beatmaker can get paid ahead of time but the songwriter has to wait until the song makes it to radio or possibly onto an album.

Again, the way the rest of the world works is a lot different to the way we do it here and hopefully these insights into the way the music industry works elsewhere will help the way you handle your business here.

Here in SA, as artists, songwriters and producers have adopted a culture where we need to do everything ourselves. The mentality is that you can’t trust labels or publishers. And to a certain extent, it might be true that you’ll get screwed over if you sign any legal document.

But it really shouldn’t be that way if the label/publisher firstly knows what they are doing and secondly, actually does what they’re supposed to do.

I attended the Music Exchange Conference 2013 and Nick Matzukis, an expert in copyright law has in no uncertain terms explained that there is no such thing as “standard” in any agreement. Whenever a label or publisher feeds you the story that this is a standard contract and everyone offers this, then chances are, they don’t know what they’re doing or they’re full of shit.

How it is supposed to work for the songwriter-publisher relationship is actually similar to that of the artist-label relationship.

If a publisher recognizes the talent of a songwriter, they can offer an advance for them to work and then obviously recoup their costs once royalties start coming in. It is their responsibility to then make sure that your work is exploited in every possible way. Whether it is pitching it to artists for album placement, or song-plugging at radio stations, or synchronization – which is getting your work placed on visual works. The publisher now has a vested interest and has to make sure that your song makes money in order for them to recoup their cost and make a profit.

However, that is not how it works here. Most publishers ask you to either sign a non-exclusive or exclusive agreement. In that you sign away 50% of your copyright over to them. And in exchange all they are doing is registering your song with SAMRO (South African Music Rights Organisation) and collecting their half of the royalties.

So what’s the point of signing away half the copyright to songs you’ve put so much time and effort into, if you are pushing it to radio yourself and made contacts in order to get it placed? I think it is a little unfair that if I write a song and got it placed on an album myself, pushed it to radio myself and maybe even got it on TV myself, the publisher says thanks very much for my 50%.

If all you doing is admin work on my song, then you’d be lucky to get 10% of that copyright. Let alone 50%. This is also why most songwriters prefer to handle their own publishing but it becomes very laborious.

However, if I had a publisher that knew what they were doing and one I could trust then I could just concentrate on songwriting, knowing all the other stuff is covered and my publisher is making sure that my song is exploited in every way possible.

I hope that I could help our Capetonian music industry somehow with this blog series. If I inspired at least one person, then it’ll be mission accomplished.