Tag Archives: licensing

Our world: the Beatles can get $250k for the use of an original recording on a TV show

Posted on by

I’ve seen/heard several discussions of the use of the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows” to close the most recent episode of Mad Men. Here is some of the story behind how the show was able to get permission to use the song – for $250,000:

 “It was always my feeling that the show lacked a certain authenticity because we never could have an actual master recording of the Beatles performing,” Matthew Weiner, the creator and show runner of “Mad Men,” said in a telephone interview on Monday. “Not just someone singing their song or a version of their song, but them, doing a song in the show. It always felt to me like a flaw. Because they are the band, probably, of the 20th century.”…

Near the end of the “Mad Men” episode, titled “Lady Lazarus” and written by Mr. Weiner, the advertising executive Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) finds himself struggling to understand youth culture and is given a copy of the Beatles album “Revolver,” a new release in the summer of 1966.

But instead of starting his listening experience with the album’s acerbic lead-off track, “Taxman,” Draper instead skips to its final — and, shall we say, more experimental — song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” contemplating it for a few puzzled moments before he shuts it off. (That psychedelic song, with its signature percussion loops and distorted John Lennon vocals, also plays over the closing credits of the episode.)…

To win the company’s approval in this case, Mr. Weiner said, “I had to do a couple things that I don’t like doing, which is share my story line and share my pages.” He added that he received the approval from Apple Corps last fall, about a month before filming started on the episode.

Several thoughts:

1. Does this show that the Beatles still matter? On one hand, yes: the creator said he wanted to have an authentic Beatles song on his show. On the other hand, this is a show about the 1960s – it is a period piece, a “retro cool” show, not a show about the modern day that would show the current relevance of the Beatles. The creator suggests they are the band of the 20th century, inviting questions about who might be the artist of the 21st century.

2. Contra #1 above, the Beatles can still get $250k for the use of their song. Is this about the greatness of their work or because they have been so tight in who is able to license their music? Are the copyright holders of the Beatles music (some combo of Michael Jackson’s estate and Sony?) simply waiting for McCartney and Starr to die so they can reap a windfall from licensing?

3. The article doesn’t discuss this but the selection of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is particularly interesting. This song would never make it on a Beatles “greatest hits” album (it is not on the 1 album or the Red or Blue albums of the 1970s). It is buried at the end of the Revolver album. At the same time, many books and critics acknowledge that this song is a turning point in the group’s career. It was actually the first recorded song for Revolver, an album noted by many critics as the greatest album (or one of the top 3) of all time. It was a sharp departure from earlier Beatles music: in a few short years, the group had moved from “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to Lennon singing about ideas from The Tibetan Book of the Dead with all sorts of studio effects like backward guitar around him. My guess is that the playing of song means that Don Draper’s is about to take an interesting turn (along with the rest of the 1960s).

4. A question about copyright: will the Beatles music ever become part of the public domain? It would be a shame if it does not.

5. How long until we live in a world when nobody knows about or cares about the Beatles? I’m particularly interested in the changes that will happen when the Baby Boomer generation fades away…

Pandora’s (copyright) box

Posted on by

It’s no secret that copyright law is ridiculously complicated and in bad need of reform.  In case anyone needed reminding, paidContent covered Pandora’s CEO Joe Kennedy’s recent speech at the NARM music conference in San Francisco.  The article’s headings say it all:

  • “The complexity of international copyright limits Pandora’s business.”
  • “How huge damages in copyright law have skewed business relationships.”
  • “Our definition of ‘copies’ might need to change for the digital age.”

That’s a pretty good summary of precisely where copyright law has gone wrong.  Be sure to check out the full article.

Licensing theater

Posted on by

Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society pointed me to a comprehensive study by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) (Wikipedia backgrounder) on the effects of media piracy in emerging markets:

Based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

“The choice,” said Joe Karaganis, director of the project, “isn’t between high piracy and low piracy in most media markets. The choice, rather, is between high-piracy, high-price markets and high-piracy, low price markets. Our work shows that media businesses can survive in both environments, and that developing countries have a strong interest in promoting the latter. This problem has little to do with enforcement and a lot to do with fostering competition.”

I’m looking forward to perusing the report, but there’s a threshold issue that I want to address:  SSRC has released the report itself subject to a “Consumer’s Dilemma” license:

[T]he CD license creates different paths to acquiring the report: first, we have an IP address geolocator that sends visitors from high income countries toward an $8 paywall when they download the report;  all other resolvable IP addresses get free access.  Second, and separately available, a ‘commercial reader’ license that costs $2000.

Why did SSRC set things up this way?  Licensing theater:

Maybe some clarification is in order here. If you are residing in one of the listed high-income countries, want to read the report, but think that $8 is an unreasonable price, you can acquire it for free through other means.  In fact, we have made it exceedingly easy to do so. If you fall under the terms of the commercial reader license but think that $2000 is unreasonable, you have the same options (plus the $8 option).  In both cases, the reader is faced with a dilemma: pay the legal price (roughly mapping ability to pay to a determination about whether the price is fair), acquire it through pirate channels, or don’t bother with it.  In most of the countries we’ve studied in this report, the results of this calculation with respect to DVDs, music, and software are strikingly consistent.  Media goods are highly desired, exorbitantly priced with respect to local incomes, and freely available through pirate channels.   High rates of piracy and tiny legal markets are the result. We’ve written 400+ pages about this dysfunctional form of globalization and its causes.

The resulting consumer dilemma is a ubiquitous experience in medium and low-income countries but one that confronts the American or European reader (or the media company employee conjured up by the commercial reader license) much less frequently and with much less intensity.  The global market is made for those consumers.  It is priced and distributed for them.  They are rarely faced with what they experience as ridiculous pricing for a DVD or book–or seriously disadvantaged by differential pricing.  The Consumer’s Dilemma license is a way of reversing that equation and, in the most minor ways,  requiring an explicit engagement with it.  Among the surreal aspects, that simple choice can subject you to crushing civil and criminal penalties, but you can rest easy knowing that only very rare, arbitrary examples will be made (and none in our case).  Now that’s theater.  Our license has a theatrical side, to be sure, but it also stays true to the experiences  documented in the report.

Well done, SSRC.  Now I’m really curious to read the report…

Update: TechDirt has posted an initial analysis of the report here.

Oh Canada

Posted on by

I’ve made the point here before that the music industry inexplicably declines perfectly good revenue sources simply because they are “less” than what they are expecting.  At the risk of Monday-morning-quarterbacking their business model, here’s more proof from north of the border, courtesy of Michael Geist:

Pandora, the popular U.S. online music service filed for an initial public offering last week, provided new insight into hugely popular company that spends millions of dollars in copyright royalties. Pandora users listened to a billion hours of music in the last three months of 2010. Given U.S. laws, the Pandora prospectus notes that it paid for the privilege of having its users do so, with the company spending just over half of its revenue on copyright fees – $45 million in the first nine months of 2010.

The numbers are striking since it points to a growing source of revenue that is largely being missed in Canada. Millions of dollars are now generated from online streaming royalties in the U.S., yet many companies are avoiding the Canadian market. The reason, as Pandora explained last year, are the royalty demands of the major record labels. As Tim Westergren stated last fall, “as long as rights societies take this approach, they will prevent Pandora from launching to Canadian users.” While CRIA tried to claim that the decision to avoid the market was a function of Canadian copyright law, Pandora indicated that it is the fee demands, not the laws that are the stumbling block. With millions now being paid for streaming music in the U.S., it is notable that Canadian interests would seemingly prefer to receive nothing rather than the millions that could potentially be on the table.

Nobody’s a hero here

Posted on by

The thrill is gone:  today we find out that there will not be another Guitar Hero release anytime in the foreseeable future:

Activision Blizzard will close its music-game business division, laying off hundreds of employees, and cancel the Guitar Hero game that was in development for 2011, the publisher said in a conference call Wednesday.

The drastic move comes after significant industrywide declines in the music game business. In 2007, Activision sold 1.5 million copies of Guitar Hero III in its first month of sales. Last year, Activision only sold 86,000 copies of the latest game in the series, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. Slowing sales of chief competitor Rock Band led Viacom to sell maker Harmonix and close the MTV Games publishing division.

Activision said that the decline of the genre, plus the high cost of licensing music and producing the games, led it to close the business. [emphasis added]

Arguably, Guitar Hero and Rock Band were fads (at least, at their white-hot sales peaks) whose time had passed.  Nevertheless, these games were probably some of the cheapest console games (from a technical/development standpoint) made in the last few years.  The real cost driver here had to be the music licensing fees.  At the right (i.e., low enough) price, these games probably could have been made indefinitely, but it appears that monopoly-imposed costs have outstripped demand and the dreaded deadweight loss triangle has destroyed the market.

Which begs the question:  why does the music industry continually insist on killing geese that lay it golden eggs? In my view, there’s a difference between profiting from risk taking (i.e., capitalism generally) and expecting other people to pay you an ever-increasing cut of the revenue stream based on the risks they took in finding and exploiting a new market which literally did not exist before.  As for the music industry’s attempt to parlay other people’s risk taking into ever bigger royalty streams for themselves, they can’t really complain when the market softens and no one can afford to pay their exorbitant fees.

(On a final, parenthetical note:  no-doubt-soon-to-be-former music industry execs should perhaps consider a career move into lottery management.  In addition to being the ultimate something-for-nothing industry, the lottery is bigger than porn, movies, and music combined. It’s also a regressive tax on the poor, a perfect money-laundering machine for organized crime, and easily rigged.)