The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
  1. #1

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    Curious how copyrights get handled for standards and other tunes - is there some informal rule about a financial threshold before money and permissions get involved, either for recordings or performances?

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  3. #2

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    Not a rule but a practice: copyright infringers get away with it unless the copyright holder will spend the money to sue.

    I believe that the old legal standard for incorporating clips is 30 seconds or less - i.e. if you are a TV station doing a story about a pop star you can include up to 30 sec of copyrighted music as part of your story. 30 seconds is a long time/pretty generous - most media outlets don't use more than about a 10 second clip for informational purposes. I think you CAN use that 30 seconds as a bed in your commercial for toilet plungers without paying any royalties; IDK if you have to get permission to use it.

    Pretty sure that the 30 second allowance does not apply to sampling. If you want to sample a tune and create a derivative work, that is another set of rules, but I can't quote them. Perhaps an attorney on the forum can fill us in. IIRC Rick James sued MC Hammer successfully for sampling "Superfreak" as the backing for "Can't Touch This."

  4. #3

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    If you are selling CD's of copyrighted music the correct thing to do would be to contact Harry Fox agency prior to releasing the CD. They will ask how many CD's you plan to print up and what songs are on the CD. You will be assessed a bill based around that with varying fees depending on which songs. Printing a 1000 cd's of a 10 song CD can get extremely pricey if it's all covers of copywritten material. Some artists demand a lot of money for covering their stuff. Printing more CD's for sale=larger bill up front unless you are doing material in the public domain in which case there is no charge. If you sell them all and print more you will need to pay again.

    I believe BMI/ASCAP do the collecting from venues hosting cover bands/music. That would be the club's responsibility not yours. They have personnel making the rounds putting the squeeze on the clubs for the cash. Not a small bill either. Some people call them thugs, lol, but as an artist who gets paid last and least it's good to have some aggressive collections if you are trying to scrape by in the industry on your original material.

  5. #4

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    Checking through CD Baby, the license to record a cover of someone else's tune in your album (physical or digital) was 3$ per song, plus a percentage of streaming income afterwards.