4 ms·

you're burying the lead, so to speak: Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and o

• jacquesm 17y ago
  Part of this stems from the amazingly messy rights situation that most music falls under. There are rights to text, rights to music, performance rights, neighbouring rights, sometimes the text gets translated and so on. You have to make deals with many parties if you want to use a piece of music. What I don't get about the hypothetical case against Apple here is that Apple made a deal with the labels, does that not mean that the labels compensate those who were in on the creative side as well ? A single licensing entity would be a great idea from a rights perspective, even the rights organization do not know if they are the right person to represent the rights to many songs / texts. But they can offer indemnification in some cases, which is really weird, they don't own the rights, they'll take your money and if you get sued they indemnify. Great business model. In Europe the market is even more complex, almost every little country has their own licensing agencies, usually pseudo-government. And now the market is 'open' so these compete with each other.