This clever little tune is a great response to Lily Allen’s recent siding with The Establishment and coming over all Legal – which considering all her early tunes were composed around loops, beats and even words (yes, lyrics too) which were collaged, stolen, and re-used to good effect rings rather hollow. Still, who says music can’t be about itself without being up itself?
Take it away, Dan Bull.
Worth watching every second of this video’s 9:23 beginning with the great Frank Zappa, this is an analysis of how marketing breeds out innovation in music.
A few times in my career it’s been made clear to me that should X star/band choose to record my song, he/she/they will of course be credited as co-writers despite the fact they lifted not a pen nor approached a keyboard nor strummed a ukelele in the composition of this potential hit.
This claim on publishing has become relatively commonplace. Whatever the merits of the work, the craft employed, or the song’s sweet completeness, stars (via their lawyers and managers) make a smash-and-grab raid on all earnings, including publishing, so that they will continue to benefit as long as the song is generating revenue.
This kind of thing has been going on since publishing began – the Berne Convention
for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works dates back to 1886. Writers when they start out are usually desperate for any kind of success and largely ignorant of their rights, and this makes them easy targets.
I can understand the “get it while you can” mentality in the den of iniquity that is the music business. It’s as if artists are still haunted by the bad old days of tiny payments as the music industry grows fat by deducting endless amounts for spurious reasons, winnowing away at their hard-earned income. Believe it or not, CD royalties are still subject to “new technology” deduction brought in in the 1980s, and on what basis can downloads be subject to deductions for “breakages”?
Nonetheless, this particular form of artistic cannibalism fills me, as a writer, with genuine ire. From the elevated position of the star, their attitude is simple. We are your gateway to wealth, therefore we can insert our claim on the publishing revenue and if you don’t like it, we’ll use someone else’s song.
Now, I’m not naive enough to think that the world is going to be different from the way it is any time soon. But, the worst thing about this practise is that it is not being questioned or resisted, and the bigger the star, the more aggressive the lawyers, and the more certain that writers will be squeezed out of their fair share. If you’re an established writer nobody will attempt to extract part of the royalty due to you for your work, but if you’re less well known, then it’s almost guaranteed that the attempt will me made to deny you some percentage of your future earnings from your hard-won intellectual property.
I can make the distinction between an artist who picks up a song and develops it or alters it substantially enough to bring it to commercial success, by adding lyrics, or by including new melodies, for example. But, the job of making a song into a commercial recording is called Production, or Remixing, and these important activities have their own slices of the pie. Hands off mine!
It’s not enough to take a song, add beats and noises which suit your style, super-impose a rap and a three note riff, and then say,
Hey, I re-wrote it! I want 50%…
Have I ever given part of my publishing to an artist who had nothing to do with writing the song? Yes, but it was small enough not to be painful. Did I regret it? No. Did I think it was wrong? Yes. Would I do it again? It depends – not if I can avoid it!
In the end, it comes down to choice. Diminished revenue is one issue. Would you rather have 100% of a song which doesn’t sell, or a lesser amount of a big hit? But, there is also the important issue of authorship. If you give some part of your song publishing to the artist, then they are forever associated with the creation of the song. Is that going to help or harm your career? It’s a tough call, especially when the rewards are temptingly large.
The internet is a blessing for the independent creative. It gives us distribution, reach, control over how our work is presented. It also gives us freedom to do the work we most want to do. Having rejected the false notion of success, I have after some years arrived at a pattern of productive activity which I find sustainable.
First and foremost, I get regular time where the phone is off and the mail is left unopened while I work creatively on new stuff, or garden the back catalog. I might stay in the studio, or walk with a notebook, or take a guitar to the woods, but it’s my time to think and to exercise my imagination.
Then there are collaborative creative sessions with other people, which I love, gigs, events, shows, and keeping abreast of culture, which is important since that’s the field I work in. Other times, I’m calling people on the phone, developing projects, writing articles like this, editing video and audio, organising productions, work for regular clients.
Then there’s life, love and cooking. It’s a good rhythm and it works for me.
Growing up and finding your place in the many-faceted worlds which are the creative industries is a task which until recently was left almost entirely to chance. Especially in the UK, there is very little education – notable exceptions being the Croydon’s Brit School and Liverpool’s IPM and only very recent government initiatives to assist in creative career-building
For an independent songwriter musician, there’s never been a better time to get your music out there and find your audience. Avenues to revenue are changing radically, and internet business is changing all the time, which I find very exciting. We can license our own work, set the price and collect revenue ourselves, with tiny overheads, courtesy of Sir Tim. Sure, we lack the marketing power of a multi-million dollar corporation, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find an appreciative audience, and make a living. We might not be able to get into the high streets that easily, but we can certainly get into the living rooms, the pockets and the hearts of our audience.
I make money from music, but I’m very grateful for having other talents which mean I don’t have to rely solely on music for income. I’m with composer Charles Ives who believed that if you were writing with your eye on the balance sheet, it was bad for your family, and bad for music.
We can emulate Hogarth who used the modern technology of his day to make a small fortune from his prints and get through life without a patron, largely pleasing himself.
On a business level, it’s also my preferred way of working. Half my family have been print technicians, running their small business, or working for bigger ones. My press is the internet, and I am a journalist as well as publisher, as well as a creative writer, video maker and musician.
On a personal success level, my advice to any artist, young or old, talented or hopeless, is this:
So long as your family isn’t starving, and there’s a roof over your head, and you’re not doing anyone any harm, just crack on with amusing your muses.
Call whatever you decide to do “work” and then work until people take you seriously.
Look out for things that might stop you working – like, poverty, illness, jealousy, envy, drugs, dodgy dealings, badly-maintained cars – and avoid them.
Be nice to people, get help when you need it.
Keep going. Make friends. Dress up. Don’t be distracted. Do your best.
Consign wankers to the mental dustbin and pay them no attention unless it is to remove them to the karaoke bar.
Remember the wise words of The Residents: “Ignorance of your culture is not cool”
Keep your feet on the ground and your eyes and ears open.
If you see paparazzi, photograph them.
If you become famous, remember you’re a Womble
Keep going, try not to be ripped off, don’t forget the milk.
There is a problem with our modern definition of popular success, which positions it somewhere between the Grammies and rehab. Celebrity culture has totally erased the idea that being an artist is a vocation, not just an audition for the next series of Crap Idol.
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| Dean in the Daily Sport in June 2006 for writing and producing John Cleese’s world cup song |
Most importantly, isn’t this modern concoction of TV-and-tabloid celebrity rubbish, injurious to music, and don’t we all know that by now?
Confusing genuine artistic success with celebrity is a mistake which naïve artists and fans tend to make, but this banal, distorted looking-glass cult of popular fame is not anything a rational person would want.
The music business is horribly wasteful of good talent when it does appear. The media, vicariously picking over the destroyed personal lives of “stars” says that people only buy what they want, but we can’t blame the punters for the lightweight, airbrushed wallpaper that passes for contemporary pop. Devoid of real purpose, it’s not surprising that so many musicians self-destruct.
The entire media edifice is morally bankrupt, as well as in financial turmoil. Like banks, media corporations have been poisoned by bad decisions over many decades, by out-moded technical and business strategies, rampant greed, unbridled capitalism. There is very little variety at the heart of mass entertainment, and only occasional good quality surfaces, despite the millions sloshing around.
So who, apart from Cowell and his TV backers and imitators, determines who succeeds and who fails these days in a public sense? How do we measure success, if it isn’t by TV and press coverage, and consequently making enormous pots of cash from having your image in every high street?
The fashion-based music press still exists in some cocaine-drenched bloated bubble of decadence left over from the 60s and 70s and 80s, but do they really still have the power make young bands into household names, their chief ambition to be on the front cover? People love the bitching, we are told, the style wars, the egos, tribalism, sex, power, money, and adulation. Can’t we offer better options for our young talent?
Obviously, there are many better role models than Pete Docherty or Amy Winehouse, but it’s the disasters and the mess that get splashed across headlines, not the many thousands of quiet professional successes. Robbie Williams back on drugs is a story, but an engineer turned songwriter making a hit album with Robbie Williams is of far less interest to mass media.
These less well-known people are in fact the mainstay of the creative industries and it is a point that needs stressing and explaining to ambitious children. The Oscar winners we remember are ones the news media makes a fuss of, the lead actors, the directors, the stars, but it’s worth remembering that awards also go to the sound designers, script writers, editors, special effects technicians, without whom, no show.
