The Permanence of Digital Sales

Posted by Flick in Opinions on 01 11th, 2008 | 2 responses |

While music sales shift from physical media to digital, the experience artists and labels are having is not as smooth as you might suspect. Puddlegum spoke with a highly-respected artist about an issue he has faced. For his sake, his name will not be disclosed.

Several years ago this artist signed a contract with a record label with the agreement that after several years he would retain the rights to his recordings. This type of agreement is easy to honor when you’re dealing with physical records, since you’re dealing with a finite supply. When the label is out of CDs or vinyl they print more until the contract has been fulfilled. “Those agreements are supposed to have finite terms, but the digital thing is quasi-permanent,” the artist shared.

“My album was put on digital sales sites without my knowledge, towards the very end of my label agreement. The rights to the recording are supposed to revert to me. But now, the distributor for my label has the control of the digital version of my record, receives all the iTunes payments and I have not been able to get it taken out of circulation so I can re-gain control of the recording, even past the terms of my original agreement.”

“The distributor has requested iTunes and Snocap, etc to remove it repeatedly, but it hasn’t gone anywhere. So once a record is out there digitally for sale, it’s kind of permanent, and that is kind of unacceptable from an artist’s perspective unless he has control of it.”

As if to taunt him, a Snocap store appeared on his Myspace page. He didn’t request it, nor can he remove it. He has never seen a statement from Snocap or received any money from the album sales. “From talking to friends of mine, this type of thing is not isolated.”

How can this situation be prevented in the future? One answer that would not be considered by most labels is to have artists pay royalties to the record label, and handle the digital distribution themselves. “I would recommend the artist putting the release into digital stores himself, and paying the label a royalty over the period of the terms of the agreement.”

What are your thoughts?

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2 Comments »

  1. avatar vargas Says:
    January 11th, 2008 at 4:43 am

    This might be naive but my thoughts would be this: don’t sign up with a record label. Create your own label and distribute your music through that.

  2. avatar Nick Says:
    January 12th, 2008 at 2:53 pm

    Did the artist in question agree to having is music digitally distributed by the label? If not, then his label acted entirely illegally.

    Also, the distributor would never have control of the recordings, only the label would have such control. As such, the label is the one receiving the iTunes and Snocap payments. If the artists is still in recoupment (for other records other than the licensed one), it’s possible the label is cross-collateralizing to recoup these costs, and that’s why he’s not seeing any of the revenue from iTunes – but again, that would be in the details of any agreeement the artist signed.

    Also, to prevent a label/artist from uploading their catalog and then all of a sudden changing their minds, some dig. distributors have failsafes in place that require that your catalog be available with them for a certain length of time before it can be removed. That might be the case here, but again only the label would know for sure.

    As far as the Snocap store showing up on the MySpace page – you can remove/hide that by going to Edit Profile>Account Settings>Music Store>Hide music store.

    I’d recommend against an artist doing their own digital distribution (Full Disclosure: I run a music distribution and marketing company), but not just because it’s my job :-) There’s so much more to digital distribution than just getting your music on iTunes that having a dedicated party to handle the complexities is a great advantage and allows an artists to focus on being an artist. That’s not to say that an artist shouldn’t educate himself/herself about the process – but building a good team of people who can help with the business side (be that within a traditional label structure or without) is the surest path to success, IMHO.

    I do hope that the artist in question finds a positive resolution to this and soon. Flick, if you or the artist in question would like to contact me off this comment board, I’d be happy to help in any way that I can.

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