January 31, 2016 John Kellogg is a practicing entertainment lawyer and assistant chair of Music Business/
Management at Berklee College of Music in Boston. I met him when I spoke at Berklee and my firm was delighted to represent him for the release of his book Take Care of Your Music Business, Second Edition.
October 6, 2015 Under U.S. Copyright law, Congress has seen fit to legislate a minimum statutory mechanical royalty rate for songwriters and their publishers. Based on an upward-sliding scale tied to a cost-of-living index, the minimum mechanical royalty rate is set by the Copyright Royalty Tribunal on a per song per record basis. The current rate in effective is $.091 per song. However, most record companies use their substantial leverage over fledgling recording artists to cause them to enter into record contracts which purport to reduce this minimum rate pursuant to the “controlled composition” clause - and this provision might also be made to apply to producers and songwriters who do work for those artists.
Legal Advice tagged Legal, Music Publishing, songwriting August 25, 2015 When pitching a project, whether a TV program or game show concept, a video game idea, a proposal for a book or magazine article or circulating a demo of your song, it is a good idea to file a copyright registration on it before making it public. It is also important to create a paper trail in order to keep track of where and to whom your work is submitted. In the event that you someday decide that someone stole your work or “infringed” your copyright you will need to prove two things in order to win a copyright infringement lawsuit: (1) access to your work and (2) substantial similarity between your work and the allegedly infringing work.
Legal Advice tagged Copyright, Legal, copyright infringement, lawsuit July 10, 2015 It is important as a record producer to understand that each situation is unique, and the relationship between the record producer and the artist varies greatly depending on the arrangement between the parties as well as the genre of music.
Legal Advice tagged Legal, record producer 