Graham Langley (Loud and cleared) is the copyright-go-to man with over 15 years experience working with TV and film, helping them license all the music they use in their work. The main point of his talk was basically to help us, as musicians, to not get screwed-over due to copyright infringements or the like. To make sure everyone gets paid a fair amount (in most cases). Copyright has existed for over 100 years and it began to make sure musicians get paid for the music they make. Nowadays, with the sheer amount of different mediums our music is used, played or performed, copyright has become a complex and full-time force to be reckoned with.
Interestingly, currently the composers of the music own the publishing rights for 70 years after the last composers death, however the recording rights (or master rights) are owned for 50 years. They’re changing it to 70 years soon apparently, due to people like Cliff Richard whose talent never ends. Graham went into detail about how musicians like us should always get registered to the royalties governing-bodies PRS and MCPS. PRS stands for Performing Rights Society, MCPS standing for Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, and both of which will be the means you get paid by if your music starts being played on radio, TV, at festivals, clubs, pubs, hairdressers and so on.
There are also other licensing bodies which deal with music for promotional videos and other bits and bobs, but directing his talk on a group full of musicians and producers, there was only a brief overview on this.
As this was the first session on at Industry week, I was surprised to be changing the way I think about music so early on. Of course a lot of musicians want to make music they like, but we all need to earn a living in the end. One thing he mentioned that made me think twice was how much you could earn by having your music played on a program or advert. BBC1 pay out £14.78 per minute of music played, so if you had a contract with them that said you played 2 minutes worth of your music a day for a year, bearing in mind this is a 20 second composition that took you minimal time to perfect, you would earn nearly 10 grand! However, you wouldn’t get these kind of royalties if you were making music for smaller TV channels, as he made an example in terms of horse racing on TV. PRS do not have the time to figure all of the data out and distribute the money evenly for channels like that, which aren’t paying much money to them. Therefore they have sample days once a month where PRS pay royalties to whoevers music was played that day. Seems wrong if you think your track is played every other day on that channel and they didn’t catch it, however the money you would be paid would be quite small in comparison to other work.
Amongst his other in depth knowledge of copyright and licensing, everyone I spoke to after the talk was happy to learn in a bit more depth about this sort of thing. I suppose many musicians forget how important all of the licenses and rights within their music is,and it is top-notch foundational knowledge for any aspiring artist which was taken full advantage of.
Claudia Waller, Level 3 in Music Technology
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