Taylor Swift's music catologue sold for $300 million without her knowledge

[msongs]

all the rights to her music, masters of her albums, album art, the works up til lately have been sold by one media conglomerate to another without swift being consulted or offered an opportunity to buy it herself.

She plans to re-record all her old albums she will own the rights t the new versions, competing for sales with her old self.. this tactic has a long history, with olden day acts like the everly brothers cutting new versions of their old hits.


https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/smallbusiness/taylor-swifts-music-catalog-sold-for-hundreds-of-millions-but-shes-really-unhappy-about-it/ar-BB1b6Dw3

[mr_lebowski]

1. If she's going to be re-recording her own songs to combat this, then her lawyers did a very bad job

negotiating the original contracts, I have to think.

That's crappy. Poor Taylor!

[msongs]

2. she will still get her contractural share of the pie but the whipped cream goes to the

new corporate owners

[Blue_true]

7. Not poor Taylor. She is rich and she seems to be really smart.

I believe this will be just a tempest in a teapot for her.

[Progressive Law]

11. New artists don't have lawyers on their side. That's why they usually get fucked.

[ProfessorGAC]

20. This!

I know plenty of guys that signed record deals. The only lawyer involved was the record company counsel.

[rickford66]

3. Didn't a similar situation create - "Barracuda" (1977) Heart

Just going by memory.

[msongs]

4. something similar, but the biggee was lennon/mcartney catalogue going to m jackson nt

[ProfessorGAC]

21. Another Biggie!

John Fogarty getting sued for sounding to much like himself!

[Blue_true]

5. Taylor reached fame when record companies had a strong hold on top talent.

The modern age where artists can self publish, promote and sell their work directly to the public has loosened the hold of record companies.

Taylor Swift appears to be really smart business-wise, she will likely figure out how to do a long term end around record companies.

[BGBD]

6. This is probably a bigger problem

for other artists. Swift has a massive following of very loyal fans. She could release her stuff again and they'd all go out and buy it. She could release something new and make that much on it as well.

This is a bigger problem for an artist that might not have that kind of weight behind them or who's best days have past and they are relying on those old recordings to carry them.

[Blue_true]

9. The young female singer that started out selling her work directly to the public

forced the record companies to deal on her terms. She also has a massive following (although a oldie like me can’t even remember her name). Really talented artists don’t need record companies in the age of self-publishing.

[BGBD]

13. That's true now, and not just in music.

Books, movies, TV, etc. There are platforms now that skip the old gatekeepers.

You can self-publish books on Amazon. You don't have to get a publisher who can distribute to bookstores and promote. You have full access to the worlds largest retailor, can print on demand, do e-books, and sell on Audible as an audio book. You can promote on social media.

You can create a YouTube account and shoot your own series on whatever you want. It can be you talking to the camera or a scripted full length production. If you start small and get a following you can use that to crowdfund your more ambitious projects.

In music you can release on iTunes or Spotify and be in the hands of hundreds of millions of people.

This is only true in the past 10 years or so. It used to be the publisher, labels, etc were about access. They decided who would get put on stage. Now, anyone can. Doesn't mean they will be a success, but who is successful in entertainment is much more democratic now than it ever has been.

[Blue_true]

15. Taylor Swift started selling her work when she was like 17.

I believe she is around 30-31 now, so se would have started out when record companies and top agents had lots of sway over a singer’s career.

I believe the young female musician started out on Spotify and gained a bigger and bigger following. When she finally started working with a label, she called the shots.

I don’t think that Amazon has yet had a real big writer that came up on it’s self-publishing platform, but it is only a matter of time before one or more writers reach that status, I believe that will upend the publishing and movie making (scripts from novels) world. I have always wondered why Amazon doesn’t scour the massive library of self-published work for material to make movies for it’s movie platform, it could likely buy the movie-rights for a decent but still small amount of money, the company paid something like $150 million dollars to the Tolkien Estate for the rights to use the Lord of the Ring work in future projects, imagine how far that would go with Amazon buying movie making rights to talented self-published writers that it has in it’s stable.

Moby Dick is considered one of the greatest American novels of all time and Herman Melville possibly the greatest American writer of all time, but Moby Dick was a complete commercial failure and Herman Melville lived in modest living conditions, often relying on his prominent father-in-law for job referrals and occasional financial assistance. Melville worked most of his adult life as a customs inspector, imagine being a person whose family member passed down an old customs form that was approved and signed by Herman Melville - yet, in his life, his signature meant nothing beyond the work that he was doing to earn a modest living.

I have noticed that James Patterson seem to write what he wants to write and collaborate with whoever he wants to work with. He seems to have an enormous amount of control over his work, but next to Stephen King, he is the best known living American writer.

[BGBD]

17. I think

Lovecraft never experienced critical success during his life either.

I found an article on Amazon self-publishers. https://claudenougat.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/only-40-self-published-authors-are-a-success-says-amazon/

This is 4 years old now, so the numbers are outdated but it says "only" 40 self-published authors were successful on the platform. Of course "success" is subjective but according to them means having sold 1 million copies over the past 5 years. I would call that more than success. I would feel pretty successful had I sold 10,000 copies of books in that time, but whatever. If you could make $1 profit on each sell, you could make a pretty nice living selling 250k books over 5 years.

Clearly, the most important factor in success if you have a good product to offer is letting people know that it exists. The most successful authors/artists will be the one.s who did the best job of advertising their work.

[Blue_true]

18. Literature and art are areas where a person could be among the best

of his or her era and go un-noticed. Several Painters who were virtual unknowns produced paintings that sell for many millions today. Sort of fascinating and sad at once with out that works.

[regnaD kciN]

8. As much as I can understand Swift's annoyance...

...once you sell your rights to one company, they can sell it to any other without offering you first refusal. I’m sure Paul McCartney was equally annoyed when Michael Jackson bought the Beatles’ song catalog, but that was at least the second time that catalog was sold, and McCartney lost all rights to it once he and John Lennon assigned the publishing rights to Dick James Music early in the 1960s. From that point on, as long as whoever owns your publishing rights keeps paying you the appropriate royalties, they can do whatever they want with it without your permission.

And, yes, a number of older acts have re-recorded their old hit songs to get the performance rights, at least, away from the “owner” of the previous versions. Unfortunately, in virtually all cases, the re-recordings become more a curiosity than anything else — the public generally want the versions that were the big success, not later ones that always sound somewhat different from the versiothey remember.

[msongs]

10. back in the day a lot of those re-recorded albums did not disclose "not the orignials", bought

several like that and trashed them lol

[Blue_true]

12. Does that apply to artists that self-publish their work, writers, musicians, ect?

I know that Amazon provides a platform for writers to self-publish their work. Does Amazon have the publishing rights, or do writers have those rights and allow Amazon to publish their work.

The question hasn’t been really answered because most people who self-publish on Amazon don’t sell much. But say one or more of those writers become big, then what? In theory, since they technically are their publisher and give limited rights to Amazon, once they become big, they can not renew their agreement with Amazon.

[DavidDvorkin]

14. The writer retains all rights

Some of those self-published books have hit it big, and the authors benefited, not Amazon.

[Blue_true]

19. No, Amazon benefitted. Guess who sells the books, regardless of the origin. nt

[DavidDvorkin]

22. Amazon gets its share, but it doesn't own the rights

The author retains all rights.

[Massacure]

16. Amazon has a couple different royalty schemes available

Writers can list an eBook on Amazon and receive a 70% royalty on the list price minus distribution costs (which amount to only a few cents per download) as long as the book price is less than $9.99. If they do this, they are free to publish their work else where.

They can also enroll their book in Kindle Unlimited and receive a share of Kindle subscription revenue for each page of their work read as a proportion of all pages read each month. Authors can enroll in this option for 90 days at a time and cannot list their work elsewhere while enrolled.