Recording - October 2011 - 69

OCTOBER 2011 TAXI Road Rally 2010

What You Absolutely Need to Know About Film & TV Music Licensing With Tanvi Patel, Part 2
Moderated by Michael Laskow
There’s been a backlash on blogs, forums—what have you—about, “Oh no, I don’t want to sign with a non-exclusive library,” because some music supervisors have been pretty vocal in saying that they will no longer work with any non-exclusive music. However, I still see plenty of credits for libraries that I know that are doing non-exclusive deals. The exclusive libraries will often have a reversion clause that sometimes can be 18 months, or two years, and sometimes I’ve seen five years! I’ve also seen deals that lock the song or track up in perpetuity—meaning forever. I used to find it offensive that somebody would want you to sign a deal with them in perpetuity. For the rest of your life that song is signed to them. One day I was complaining to somebody about it saying, “Why do you do that?” And they said, “Well, because we still put our stuff on disks, and to some extent we put it on hard drives, and send it out to companies all over the world—post production companies, post production studios—to thousands of entities. And if something is not signed in perpetuity, and it comes up for its reversion 18 months down the road, we would have to call each of them up and tell them to scratch that one off the disks.” So that’s a problem. We deal with it in a slightly different manner. We do have our deals for three years, and then they auto-renew for another three years. The only part that runs in perpetuity is the placement performance income, that’s the only part. If you decide to terminate with us, we take the tracks off of our drives immediately and we stop pitching it. But, in order to protect our clients so that they don’t have to chase you down—or your other five band members down—we have a clause in our termination agreement section that says if we place something after you’ve terminated because it’s been floating around there in the marketplace, we

Tanvi having some fun taking music from TAXI members.

can still issue the license and collect the money and send it to you. So that’s one way we’ve gotten around owning or controlling it for perpetuity. Define what a sample is. And I’m not talking about a string sample in a virtual instrument library. What’s a sample in your world? An un-cleared sample is a piece of a sound recording that you’ve taken from somebody else’s work. Hip-hoppers do it a lot, and we get explicit instructions when we submit for hiphop requests that they be sample-free. And that can get you into trouble, because even if you’ve cleared it for CD sales, it has to be cleared every time your song gets used on film and TV. So that is a copyrighted sample that typically almost all libraries or indie catalogs will not take on. It’s just cost-prohibitive, we’re one-stops. The network doesn’t want to get to Island Def Jam to clear something that they’re gonna use of ours. What is quoting?

Quoting is done quite a bit in Jazz. It’s not a sample. It’s not like you’ve taken the sound recording. It’s maybe a piece of melody or any portion of a composition that is quoted in the song. Typically a recognizable lick—maybe. Yeah. Even though your whole composition is original, you may say, “Oh, you know, I really love those horns and that feel of kind of blue…,” and you pull a little bit of that into your song. And we stay away from that too, because that requires an extra clearance as well. So that complicates your life, and you just move on to the next piece that’s easier to clear. Public domain? Everybody should know that one, but it’s on the list. It’s the trickiest. Everybody thinks that something is public domain, and it’s not. Like “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” is not public Continued on page 70
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Recording - October 2011

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