SELECT YOUR LANGUAGE

 

Owning your masters as a music artist gives you 100% control of your music without having to sell your rights to your work.  A master recording is an official original recording of a song, sound or performance.  It's the first source from which all later copies are made.  It gives you legal rights to freely appropriate and maximize your money-making opportunities.  You can license the recording to third parties, like TV shows, films, commercials or even for sampling use by other artists.  However, if your masters belongs to a record label or music producer, or sound engineer, they have the right to license out the recording and collect the royalties.  Publishing rights are different.  Publishing rights refers to musical compositions (lyrics), words and music. The masters is the sound recording.  When a record label has the artist sign away their masters, that means that the artist has no control over how their music is used and are prohibited from releasing music for any other label, distribution partner, or even other artists and any recordings made by the artist are owned by the label for the time period stated in the contract.

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It is better to license your music, instead of selling it to a label.  A licensing deal is lending it to whatever source you allow to use your music for a limited period of time, without giving up any of your rights.  However, make sure you review and understand the licensing terms, the royalties and payments, cash advance terms, marketing and publicity terms, etc.  After the licensing term ends, you regain full control over your music. When owning your masters, you get to stay in control of your music.   If you already signed your masters over to a record label, you can buy your masters back from the label, at a cost, after the label has recouped their advance money.  

 

New artists usually sign a multi-million dollar advance deal that is connected to signing away ownership of their masters and they have to work really hard towards recouping their advance to buy back their masters.  If you resist a large advance and don’t expect the label to do much for you to advance your career and put your own money to marketing and promotions, then it might be likely that the less money the record label has to pay out in advance, the more likely they might be willing to negotiate a short-term, temporary ownership of your masters.

 

A lot of artists are now becoming their own independent label, because they want to be able to keep ownership of their music as well as keep all money earned from streams and record sales.  There are several platforms where artists can market their music: Spotify, Rhapsody, iTunes, E-music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Apple Music, Pandora, etc.  After you submit your original work for U.S. Copyright, you can also contact companies like Sound Exchange, ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC and register your music with one of them and that company will help make sure that artists get paid royalties from their own original songs.

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By Jason Torrents

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