LibGuides: Music Law: Music Licensing

Guide Contents

Library Chat

Description

Music Licensing is one of the interesting topics in the music industry. Anytime you turn the tv on or walk into a restaurant and hear music playing, it requires a music license. This tab gives you a look at what goes into obtaining those licenses and how the digital age of music has changed music licensing at a rapid pace.

Books

The Permission Seeker's Guide Through the Legal Jungle by Joy R. Butler
Call Number: Available online
ISBN: 0967294010
Publication Date: 2007-06-01
A resource for media producers who don't want to be sued! Clearing rights means keeping material likely to spark legal action out of your production. Yet, knowing which materials may permissibly be used is a constant challenge. This book offers detailed guidance for seeking permission and clearing rights to use quotes, music, art, names, film clips, and other protected materials.
Music Rights Unveiled by Brooke Wentz & Maryam Battaglia
Call Number: Available online
ISBN: 9781138673311
Publication Date: 2017-10-02
Music Rights Unveiled provides an inside look at the complex world of music rights for film and video and includes step-by-step guidance to navigate these tricky waters. Authors Brooke Wentz and Maryam Battaglia share their decades of expertise in this user-friendly guide, designed specifically with filmmakers and producers in mind. The book provides a brief history of the pricing of music in film, television and digital media markets, and explains the process by which music is licensed or acquired for films, highlighting pitfalls to avoid and strategies for success. Further features include: A discussion of new media platforms and the intricacies of the rights needed to use music on those platforms; Tips for working with key music staff on a production - the Composer, the Music Supervisor and the Music Edit∨ An in-depth explanation of building a budget for the music component of your media project.
Kohn on Music Licensing by Al Kohn
Call Number: KF3035 .K64 2010
ISBN: 9780735590908
Publication Date: 2010
Whether you are a music publisher or songwriter looking to maximize the value of your music catalog, or a producer, ad agency, or internet music service seeking to clear music rights for products, performances, and other uses, the new Fourth Edition of Kohn On Music Licensing offers you comprehensive and authoritative guidance. Written by experts with over 70 years of combined hands-on experience, this one-of-a-kind resource takes you through the various music licensing processes, type-by-type and step-by-step. In clear, coherent language, they provide detailed explanations of the many kinds of music licenses, identify the critical issues addressed in each, and offer valuable strategy and guidance to both rights owners and prospective licensees.

Selected Articles

Amanda Alasauskas, Digital Get Down - Music Licensing in the Digital Age, Ent. & Sports Law., Winter 2017, at 75 Music can be created at home instead of in the studio, musicians can collaborate with artists from across the globe and market themselves online, and venues, such as satellite radio, offer a wide array of music options to new audiences on a grand scale.1111 However, as was stated in the opening statements of the panel, there is a saying that "digital is the future," but digital is here, it is the current.1121 Digital streaming has outpaced the physical world, causing confusion and concern to consumers, musicians, publishers, and record labels alike.11 When it comes to starting a new digital music service, there are a number of licenses that need to be obtained, all requiring individual fees and contracts.1141 For instance, if a service wants to use recorded masters-not every service does-it needs to get rights from the record company. [...]when making these deals, content owners still want to empower up and coming digital services and help them get off of the ground floor, allowing them to have a thriving business in the market place and make money.[|6] On the other hand, licensees presumably want to cut a fair deal with content owners in order to ensure that artists are being fairly compensated.\n The situation gets even more interesting in Canada, where reproduction rights societies are able to file tariffs with the copyright board for rate increases/321 As in the United States, these societies are reluctant to enter into a licensing deal when the rate that is entered into could change and be lower than what the Copyright Board certifies.1331 However, the biggest issue is the backlog of the Copyright Board.
- This link opens in a new window
Christian Handke, Bodó Balázs & Joan-Josep Vallbé, Going Means Trouble and Staying Makes It Double: The Value of Licensing Recorded Music Online, 40 J. Cultural Econ. 227 (2016) This paper discusses whether a copyright compensation system (CCS) for recorded music—endowing private Internet subscribers with the right to download and use works in return for a fee—would be welfare increasing. It reports on the results of a discrete choice experiment conducted with a representative sample of the Dutch population consisting of 4986 participants. Under some conservative assumptions, we find that applied only to recorded music, a mandatory CCS could increase the welfare of rights holders and users in the Netherlands by over €600 million per year (over €35 per capita). This far exceeds current rights holder revenues from the market of recorded music of ca. €144 million per year. A monthly CCS fee of ca. €1.74 as a surcharge on Dutch Internet subscriptions would raise the same amount of revenues to rights holders as the current market for recorded music. With a voluntary CCS, the estimated welfare gains to users and rights holders are even greater for CCS fees below €20 on the user side. A voluntary CCS would also perform better in the long run, as it could retain a greater extent of market coordination. The results of our choice experiment indicate that a well-designed CCS for recorded music would simultaneously make users and rights holders better off. This result holds even if we correct for frequently observed rates of overestimation in contingent valuation studies.
Gabriella A. Conte, Waiting on the (Music) World to Change: Licensing in the Digital Age of Music, 83 Brook. L. Rev. 323 (2017)
- This link opens in a new window
Theodore Z. Wyman, Annotation, Enforceability of Synchronization Rights and Licenses in Copyrighted Music, 84 A.L.R. Fed. 2d 345 (2014)
- This link opens in a new window
American Law Reports (A.L.R.) article compiling case law on the right to synchronize copyrighted musical compositions and sound recordings with audiovisual works such as motion pictures.