Whose project is it anyway? Flashbacks

Posted Jun 7, 2007 21:57 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
Parent article: Whose project is it anyway?

Actually this story sounds like a lot of issues one hears in the music industry. Who owns the music? Who owns the band name? How does one split a band? Are hosting sites like music publishing labels?

Whose project is it anyway? Music industry analogy

Posted Jun 8, 2007 0:25 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know much about the music industry, but I very much doubt that a music publishing label gets involved with a band without having signed a contract that answers most of those questions. For one thing, cash flows between the two almost from the beginning.

In contrast, with open source software, we see people getting together with no formal declaration of their relationship and nobody pays anybody for anything.

I guess a music industry analogy would be where a band and label have been working together for five years and then one day the band says to the label, "you've just pressing CD's for us and your services are no longer required." And the label says to the band, "you've just been recording masters for us. Your services are no longer required." Has that ever happened?

Whose project is it anyway? Music industry analogy

Posted Jun 9, 2007 17:08 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

It happened quite a bit during the 1950's and 1960's with many bands. Various lawsuits with the labels winning a lot fo the cases. Enough occurred that most modern bands do know to ask and sign such contracts (the labels lost enough cases to know that they needed to have such contracts up front also).

My vague memory of a VH1 documentary (thus unbiased :))... was that the precedent for labels owning without written contract was that the majority of the monetary resources (hosting, promotion, etc) was theirs.. the creative work was 'minor' in comparison as the the label was taking the majority of the risk. Again... vague recollections and not a lawyer (but watched one on A&E)