Moderated by Michael Laskow
Live at the TAXI Road Rally, November 5, 2022
Jeff Freundlich, Craig Pilo, Greg Carrozza, Michael Laskow, and Michael Eames grab a quick shot after their panel.
Michael Eames: Jeff’s company and our company deal with the same thing. It’s not just TAXI members making pitches that don’t fit what’s being asked for! I don’t know how many times that we talk to supervisors who just get frustrated as hell. I don’t think their percentage of music that doesn’t fit the brief is as high as 95%, but it’s still like they get frustrated that all of the record labels and the publishers that they deal with don’t send what was asked for, they send whatever is the priority of that label or that publisher at the time, because the other reverse pressure is that person at that company has to basically prove to their bosses that they are pitching the priorities that they’re pressuring them to pitch. But then that is a delicate thing, where the supervisor is just getting pissed at the person who just wasted their time. It’s a behavior that’s all over the place.
“I’ve earned more trust from music supervisors by saying, ‘Hey, I don’t want to waste your time, I’m not going to pitch for this. Thanks, I’ll hit you on the next one.’”—Jeff Freundlich
Jeff Freundlich: I was gonna say, if we did that to music supervisors, we’d be out of business. Once you’ve broken the trust with a music supervisor, you’re done. That’s it—why would they come back to you, right?
So, when you submit to TAXI, you have to think like a businessperson, not just like, “Oh, I created music and it’s emotional and I love it.” You have to think more like, “Does this fit what I’m being asked for?” And if the answer is no, then back off and wait for the next one, because there are gonna be a ton of other opportunities. I’ve earned more trust from music supervisors by saying, “Hey, I don’t want to waste your time, I’m not going to pitch for this. Thanks, I’ll hit you on the next one.”
Michael Eames: And it’s usually the major record labels and the major publishers who are the ones that I hear the supervisors complaining about regarding this behavior, because they know that the supervisor still has to come back to them, because they’re the majors. So, they still have a huge volume of material; they’re always going to be contacted anyway, even if they piss somebody off.
I’m gonna take three minutes to tell a little story. How many of you know “The Shoe Store Story”? [About half of the audience members raised their hands.]
My parents owned a small clothing store in a farm town in Illinois, and when I was 14 or 15 years old, my dad said to me, “The shoe lady has to have major surgery—she’s out for the summer. You’re the new shoe lady.” Thanks, dad.
So, I quickly learned that if a woman came in and asked for a beige, size seven- and-a-half-B pump with a three-and-a-half-inch heel, and I brought out a Bass Weejun cordovan men’s penny loafer in nine-and-a-half-D... “This is an awesome shoe, look at that. Cordovan, it’s beautiful!” The response from the lady would be, “But it’s for a man, and it’s the wrong size, and it doesn’t have a three-and-a-half-inch heel, and it’s the wrong color!” [Audience laughter] Makes perfect sense when you hear about it in the context of shoes, right? In music, it doesn’t seem to matter, apparently; the customer’s request just gets thrown out the window. You’re gonna hear that story from me over and over. The longer you belong to TAXI, the more you’re going to hear it.
Greg Carrozza: So, don’t wear the wrong shoes.
That’s right. But people do. They literally can’t help themselves, and I do understand it. It’s their art, it’s their soul, it comes out of them.
Greg Carrozza: Don’t you think it is really a symptom of the underlying condition that you are holding your work a little too dear? You used the phrase earlier, “This is the song that’s gonna launch my whole career.” Well, really that’s not going to happen, no matter who you are. One song is just one tiny little piece of your whole career. So, there’s a moment you kind of let go of that and you can move on to the next one and move on to the next one.
Now we’re going to Michael Eames, who is the most articulate person on my most favorite and least favorite subject in the entire world. Michael, I cede the floor to you. Scare the hell out of them for me, will ya?
Michael: That’s why I came here. Would you preface it, Michael [Laskow]?
We’ve talked about this before; I’m gonna talk about it again, because we’re gonna drill it into every head in this room so that TAXI’s members get this right when everybody else you are competing against doesn’t. And that is…CD Baby, TuneCore, any of the other aggregators, they are all fine companies. They’re not out to hurt you, they’re not out to rip you off, they’re not doing anything illegal or untoward. They’re fantastic for distribution… use them for distribution. When you’re not reading all the legalese when you’re signing up, because you’re so excited and you see a little box, though, that says, “Would you like us to monetize your music by licensing it”? And you go, “Hell yeah, I’m gonna get a check.” But when you check that box that gives them permission to monetize your music, you’ve just signed a publishing deal. How then, can you submit it to another publishing company or music library when you’ve already got a publisher!
Was that an okay preface, Michael Eames?
Michael Eames: That was a fabulous preface. That was exactly why I wanted you to do it.
What this comes down to is going back to the previous conversation with Jeff about due diligence, right? This is symptomatic, I think, of the way in which we all interact on the Internet, right? Whenever we sign up for something, we set up an account, we set up our username and password and all this kind of stuff. Anyone here, raise your hand if you have ever read the terms and conditions before you click yes on the box. [About 40% of the audience members raised their hands.] Oh, come on, I don’t believe you at all. [Laughter] I only really believe the dude in the back with the beard, because he was so quick with the hand.
This has come up in my world, maybe it’s come up in Jeff’s. But when we get involved in representing independent artists for sync, which we do a lot, and we do admin for them. Your question earlier of the due-diligence steps, one of the many steps that all of us go through with due diligence, is looking at the PRO. Like, are you a member of a PRO? And to be honest, even though we ask the writer that question, I never believe them. Because more than 50% of the time I’m going to go to the PRO and find that they had actually signed up for the other PRO. And not the other, right? There are three main ones in the U.S.—ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. There are actually three more in addition to those three, but nonetheless, it’s the three major ones that everyone is usually a member of. And we also ask, “Do you have a publishing company set up?” and in almost all cases everyone says yes, and then we look, and they are wrong. They never set up a publisher membership [with their PRO] because the writer membership is separate from the publisher membership, two different memberships.
“I just cannot stress enough how you need to understand the implications of what you check-off on any of these online services, because you are entering into an exclusive agreement with those services.”—Michael Eames
We had a situation once—the band will remain unnamed, and actually even the publishing service will remain unnamed—but we signed a deal with them, we did due diligence, but apparently not well enough, because we got a placement and then it turned out that they had signed up for one of these distributor/publishing-administration services. So, I had to call the publishing-administration service and get them out of the deal. So more often than not, and there may very well be CD Baby, PRO, Songtrust, TuneCore folks here. I hear rumors that Distrokid is gonna set up a publishing admin service at some point. This is not a slam on any of them, because one of my other points, that when we get to it in this panel, I’m gonna circle back to those companies and those services, which are very important for something that we’ll talk about in a bit.
But, I just cannot stress enough how you need to understand the implications of what you check-off on any of these online services, because you are entering into an exclusive agreement with those services. Now, to their credit, usually the initial term is one year, and then it usually cycles month by month and you can get out. But I can’t tell you how many times we’ve encountered it, and I know other companies, because I’ve talked to them, have encountered it, where they are so excited and they sign a deal and then find out that, “Oh my god, wait, no” for that one album that they uploaded through that distributor, they entered into an exclusive pub-admin agreement three months ago. Maybe their manager did, or someone in the band did and didn’t really know what they were doing. It’s really problematic.
So even though those services serve a very valuable service and purpose, you need to understand that as soon as you click that box and you have entered into that administration deal, you can’t go sign the music anywhere else. You would need to go back to that company and say, “Hey, look, I know I’m in this term with you, but I’ve had this opportunity; can you please release me from this?” And I don’t think I’ve ever heard any instance where someone was refused that request. But you can get yourself in a lot of trouble with the publisher or the sync licensing company that you’re dealing with. Whenever anything happens and your name is associated with it, you know, it’s hard to get over that, it becomes a red flag. Because if you’re not aware of it, there are ridiculous amounts of independent artists worldwide. There is an immense amount of music all over the world. So, we’ll probably get into this other exclusive/non-exclusive retitling stuff, maybe if we have time here. But please, 100% know what you are agreeing to when you click on it and adhere to it.
Now, the only last thing that I want to encourage you all to do if and when you sign up for any of these services, to help you out, please make sure that you’ve actually set up your publishing company. Because one of the things that comes up a lot in the due diligence is a CD Baby Pro or a Songtrust or a TuneCore, and we’re not picking on them, they just happen to be the three main services [off the top of my head, right now].
And now some of you may know about Sentric; they are very actively coming into the space of trying to provide administration services for independent artists. But what happens usually in those agreements that you sign is that if you don’t have a publishing company set up, they are going to, when they register the work, they are going to list their own publishing company as the publisher of the work. Now, to be fair, they are not taking your publishing, they are not taking your rights, because you have to sign a piece of paper to assign rights to somebody. But you have assigned the ability for them to control your work and your administration deal. But they need to register the work, and there needs to be a publisher [listed] on the work. So they are going to register their company name as the publisher of the work, but that then tells the whole rest of the world in the rights-management space that they are the “original publisher of the work” when they are not.
So, you really should be setting up your own publishing company. Yes, there is a cost for that, but the hassle sometimes when you leave that service, you then are having to go through a whole set of paperwork to get a release from the company that registered the works with their company as the original publisher. You need to basically get a quit claim that says, “No, we’re not the publisher. All rights have reverted back to the artist.” Then you’re going to have to set up your own publishing company again, and then worry about re-registering all of the works and all of the 140-plus collection societies around the world. It’s a pain in the ass.
So do it right the first time. Set up your own company, and then that’s what you give the ability for those companies to administer, or any publisher to administer.
It is mind-blowing how many ways you can hurt yourself and literally kill a career, because if something happens and it goes wide… There’s no official blacklist that I’m aware of in the industry, but we all kind of know when something really bad happens, because somebody didn’t do the right thing and it comes back to bite everybody in the ass. And couldn’t you go back and sue the artist, the creator? If they get you into trouble because they represented that they had no other publishing deal, and you didn’t uncover it for some reason. Doesn’t that come back to bite you on the ass, and then you would sue them for not providing you with the true information?
Michael: I could maybe, but it’s got to be really bad for me to want to hire a lawyer to sue them. But it’s happened tons of times, I mean, not to us, but I mean in general. There are lots of stories where a songwriter signed deal X over here, and then signed deal Y over there, and then they each discover it. It ultimately goes back on the writer, like Jeff’s example, that writer has to cough up all the money that they thought we gave to him.
I’m surprised the writer did. I’m surprised he didn’t have to, like…
Jeff Freundlich: I mean it’s amazing, the power of flicking a lawsuit at somebody really gets their attention. It really does, it’s amazing. It could work out fine in the end.
Can we just flip this conversation slightly, which is like, what should you do? And why do CD Baby or all these companies, why do they want you to check that box? Because I don’t think CD Baby is trying to license your music; I think they are trying to—and correct me if I’m wrong—I think they are trying to collect the mechanical related to the publishing on that music. Do you agree with that?
Michael Eames: I do agree with that. And it’s been a while since I’ve logged in, but I think that it is possible that it’s two separate boxes, in the sense that there is the publishing-administration service, which is collecting the international mechanicals and all of that, and then sync would be a separate thing. But in some cases, at least in the past I’ve heard that it’s not, it all came bundled, but you can address it with them to say, “Can you release me from the sync?”
Jeff Freundlich: So the Music Modernization Act changed things quite a bit the way that a company, like a DSP like Spotify or Apple, would pay out. So, if you are a musician and you’re releasing your music, five or six years ago it was Spotify’s responsibility to make sure that they were paying for all the rights, including the mechanical and the publishing. And the Music Modernization Act, which was signed a couple of years ago said, “Okay, wait a second, we’re going to start this new entity, and it turns out it’s run by Harry Fox, which is kind of like the big database that takes care of mechanicals for like CDs or albums, or whatever. And they said, “Look, Spotify, you’re only going to pay for the portion that’s related to the recording and the master, and the MLC is going to pay out to publishers and songwriters on the mechanical side.” And so, I think that I guess where I was trying to go with the CD Babys and whatever, is that they wanted to collect on that mechanical on your behalf, and it turns out that there are like millions and millions of dollars of uncollected royalties on the mechanical side, because people release their music, but they are not set up properly to collect that money.
So, what’s tough is that if you wrote music, technically you own publishing, but if you don’t know what to do with it, then you’re really not a publisher, right? I mean, I applaud you guys for being in the room, because it means that you want to learn. You guys are kind of a step above everybody else, but what you should be doing, as Michael mentioned, is start a publishing company, get your music properly registered with BMI or ASCAP or whatever performing rights organization you’re working with, and then also start an account with the MLC, which is free, and they have all these online workshops.
Tell them what the MLC stands for.
Jeff Freundlich: The Mechanical Licensing Collective.
Michael Eames: Raise your hand if you’ve never heard of the MLC until just now. [The majority of audience members’ hands went up, and the panelists were amazed at how many people didn’t know about it.]
Want to learn about the MLC and much more? Don’t miss Part 3 of this interview in next month’s TAXI Transmitter!