A
amerigoV
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"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!!!" -- Arthur Carlson, WKRP
Maybe it's generational...
- Thread starter billd91
- Start date
...Arthur Carlson ambles by, is confused, and asks something to the effect "Do I hear Ogres growling?" to which Johnny, looking totally baked, replies "I do"...
A while back when I heard it was available I zipped on over to Amazon's site and nearly ordered it sight unseen. Just before submitting the order I went back to read the reviews and found out about the music and immediatlely pulled out of the order. I can't even bring myself to check it out on Netflix.
Northern Exposure also had the same thing happen with music. It's a shame too.
Just one more reason to hate the RIAA.
You mean the people at one of the organizations ensuring that musicians get paid for their work? They're not to blame at all.
I'll be brief: you should be aware that the median hourly wage for a musician working in Nashville is $32.36, $28.72 in NYC, $25.25 in LA and just over $10 in Austin (US Bureau of Labor, 2009)... Note that word "median": those hourly rates include the guys selling platinum albums and the guys who gig in dives.
Besides that, the royalty rate on thos old songs is going to be lower than the rate the artist gets from "album" sales, since technically, DVDs are "an unproven new medium" in the terms of their contracts.
If you want to blame someone, blame the companies that don't want to pay a fairly negotiated rate for the iconic tunes you love and instead turn to anonymous musicians making industry scale.
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What I really hate are the record labels that would sign on artists and take huge advantage of their inexperience and ignorance, especially a lot of the blues artists in the early half of the 1900's up into the 50s and 60s.
I have heard many artists tell stories of how they signed away rights to their music that the labels made a fortune on and they didn't. Musicians are artists and almost never lawyers. Who can blame them when they sign contracts like that so they can make their music?
From the Wikipedia entry on RIAA:
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trust that represents the recording industry distributors in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors, which the RIAA say "create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States".
So they really support the record labels and distributors and not the artists directly.
Can you honestly support the draconian methods the RIAA used against Sarah Seabury Ward, James Walls, and Brittany Chan?
To me music is about artists and performance, not lawyers and corporations.
I have heard many artists tell stories of how they signed away rights to their music that the labels made a fortune on and they didn't. Musicians are artists and almost never lawyers. Who can blame them when they sign contracts like that so they can make their music?
From the Wikipedia entry on RIAA:
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trust that represents the recording industry distributors in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors, which the RIAA say "create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States".
So they really support the record labels and distributors and not the artists directly.
Can you honestly support the draconian methods the RIAA used against Sarah Seabury Ward, James Walls, and Brittany Chan?
To me music is about artists and performance, not lawyers and corporations.
As an Entertainment attorney (and musician) who has used RIAA resources to help my clients, yes, I can support them in general. BTW, I hope you realize that the RIAA has among its membership artist-owned labels, and that most artists cannot afford to prosecute the kinds of cases the RIAA can. Without the RIAA, you probably wouldn't be able to hear a lot of music in TV shows because the producers would have to negotiate with each and every band individually as opposed to paying a pre-negotiated rate. (Check out RIAA's own site, from which some of that Wiki entry was cut & pasted.)
One of my earliest cases as an attorney in this field involved a band fighting a Russian piracy site that was selling illegal duplicates of their self-released album. There was no way on earth they could have done anything about it without the help of the RIAA. (Ultimately, the band broke up before I could get any action going, but the point stands.)
As for the 3 in question, the RIAA clearly made mistakes in the first 2, and in the third, the case was dismissed with prejudice because the RIAA didn't follow explicit court orders, not on the merits of the case itself.
To you, music is about artists and performance; to me, music is about artists getting paid for their performances.
Artists who don't get paid have to do things like get other jobs, which leaves less time for creative work. They usually can't afford to tour, and if they somehow manage to do so, they risk losing their day jobs, like one of my friends who was recently fired from a local instrument store.
What happened in the early days of recorded music is a damn shame, but those kinds of contracts don't generally get written anymore. That does not mean, however, that bands don't go bust anymore. Check out the documentary Electric Purgatory and you'll see (among other things) some fairly candid interviews with black musicians who admit they didn't really understand the nature of the contracts they signed, which resulted in lost rights or being broke when the terms of the contract were over.
The usual culprits?
- A lack of understanding that an "advance" is essentially a loan from the record company- the bigger it is, the more you owe- and that it gets repaid before you see a penny of royalties...as do the professional services of all the people who bring your album to market: the producer, studio musicians, the artist who did your cover art, your accountant, etc
- A lack of understanding that costs add up quickly at $400+/hour when you go into a recording studio and mess around for days, weeks or months because you're unprepared to record.
- Unprofessional behavior on tour such as wrecking hotel rooms or bathing in Crystal or simply not showing up for gigs...
All of which has to be paid for, and if you're not routinely selling Platinum or at least Gold, that kind of behavior will bankrupt you.
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Fair enough, and thanks for the info.
I've been on the receiving end of conflicts with large organizations so I do tend to wear it on my sleeve.
I can't bring myself to check out the WKRP DVD's because of the way they don't have what I originally saw back in the 70's. I guess I naturally look for a scapegoat.
EDIT: Oh BTW, I just added Electric Purgatory to my Netflix Queue. They don't currently have it but I will see when they do.
I've been on the receiving end of conflicts with large organizations so I do tend to wear it on my sleeve.
I can't bring myself to check out the WKRP DVD's because of the way they don't have what I originally saw back in the 70's. I guess I naturally look for a scapegoat.
EDIT: Oh BTW, I just added Electric Purgatory to my Netflix Queue. They don't currently have it but I will see when they do.
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CarlZog
Explorer
I don't really know the details surrounding the rights obstacles that are preventing WKRP's soundtrack from making it to DVD, but I respect artists wanting to get paid and I'd be happy to pay them again to get WKRP back.
So as an attorney in the business, can you tell me why this is so difficult? If 100 bands/musicians appeared in WKRP, does each one of them just get some miniscule percentage of each DVD sale? Or are they all looking for some overly large, flat fee just for letting it go to DVD? Or were deals originally cut for the show that prevented any of this?
I know you may not know the details of this particularly example, but I'm also just trying to understand how this works in general. For those of us who do just care about being able to hear the music, it's pretty frustrating.
Carl
It varies. Typically, each artist would get a little royalty. Sometimes, if a show is crafty, they'll try to get all of their music from one label, streamlining the process.
And it's the same kind of story for other forms of IP as well- if tou see a motor oil commercial with an identifiable car, that car company got paid. If you can't ID the car, they probably physically or digitally obscured the car's identifying marks. I've seen commercials filmed in stores where you can tell lots of things have been blurred out- that's about licensing. One commercial I saw for a historical documentary had 21 licenses for various sound or visual clips.
You might remember it took FOREVER to get the original HEAVY METAL movie released for home video- the songs were one of the major reasons for that.
Now, part of the hangup is internal to the record company deals, in which most post-CD media is technically "unproven" or "experimental" (or some similar term, and thus subject to lower royalty rates. The more powerful artists are, understandably, fighting this, so some tunes may be tied up in litigation, rendering them effectively unlicenseable.
But another factor is that- especially for older stuff- nobody included licensing agreements for anything except broadcast & syndication rights. They simply didn't think about it...sometimes because there was no such thing as home video of any kind when the shows were created.
For more modern stuff, my bet is The Suits didn't realize or didn't care that some/most of the home viewers would consider the music as integral to the show...and thus always planned to use cheaply produced studio tracks as a substitute. There's a reason the makers of nBSG didn't use Dylan's or Hendrix's version of "All along the Watchtower."
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