Taylor Swiftshed new light on the debate surrounding an artist’s right to their own musical catalog when she went afterScooter Braunfor acquiring hers.
Swift, 29, accused Braun on Sunday of “incessant and manipulative bullying,” and said that her master recordings landing in his hands was her“worst case scenario.”
Before Braun even entered the picture, though, the “ME!” singer said she’d tried unsuccessfully to get her former label, Big Machine Label Group, to allow her the opportunity to own her own music.
Instead, she was offered a new contract that would give her ownership of one of her old albums for every new one she completed. Swift declined, and moved to Universal last year.
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However, Big Machine Label founder Scott Borchetta posted a letter to the company’s web site on Sunday, claiming the label offered the star “100 percent of allTaylor Swiftassets … to be transferred to her immediately upon signing the new agreement.”
For Swift, not owning her music also means control of how and where her songs are used is out of her hands, much like the famous instance of Michael Jackson buying The Beatles’ music in the ‘80s.
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Two years later, “Revolution,” a classic track off of 1968’sThe Beatles(aka The White Album), appeared in a Nike commercial for Air Revolution – much to the chagrin of the surviving Beatles.
Michael Jackson.Michael Ochs Archive/Getty
George Harrison reportedly took issue with the apparent selling out of his band’s music, saying that using the song in a Nike ad would open the floodgates for the Beatles’ music to be used to sell everything from “women’s underwear” to “sausages.”
“We’ve got to put a stop to it in order to set a precedent,” he said. “Otherwise it’s going to be a free-for-all. It’s one thing when you’re dead, but we’re still around! They don’t have any respect for the fact that we wrote and recorded those songs, and it was our lives.”
The Nike ad even inspired a $15 million lawsuit from the Beatles’ record label Apple Records, with a lawyer claiming the band hadn’t given “authorization or permission,” according toRolling Stone. The parties reportedly settled the case out of court for undisclosed terms.
The “Band on the Run” singer said in 1995 that when he and John Lennon were first starting out in Liverpool, they knew nothing about song publishing and didn’t think twice before signing with a publisher – only to learn the hard way years later what they’d actually agreed to.
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“We literally thought that songs were in the air and everyone owned them. That’s how we met our first publisher, Dick James. He said, ‘Come in, sit down. Is that what you think? Sit over here.’ And that was the deal he did. To this day I’m virtually on that deal,” McCartney said inBeatles Anthology. “So that meant we were pretty much sewn up from the word go. Then, in March 1969, when I was on my honeymoon and John was doing his bed-in, Dick James sold the songs – while we were out of town. When we got back we said, ‘Dick, you can’t do that!’ He said, ‘You wanna bet?’ And he was quite right.”
Such tales are, unfortuantely, fairly common in the music industry. However, Prince famously took a stand to keep control over his life’s work.
US singer Prince performs on October 11, 2009 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Prince has decided to give two extra concerts at the Grand Palais titled “All Day/All Night” after he discovered the exhibition hall during Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel fashion show. AFP PHOTO BERTRAND GUAY (Photo credit should read BERTRAND GUAY/AFP/Getty Images)
“If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you,” he toldRolling Stonein 1996.
He eventually got his masters back from Warner Bros. in 2014 as part of a new deal that required him to release two new albums through the label, according toBillboard.
source: people.com
