Every musician should read this! Google, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, and Facebook are sick of paying royalties. See how they’ve been secretly getting around paying royalties.
Mose Avalon is an author, record producer, recording engineer, and artists’ rights advocate. Since 2000, he has helped hundreds of artists realize their dream and get out of bad deals. He has lectured about the music business at Havard Law, NYU, UCLA, and dozens of other venues, including NAMM. He has written popular books such as Million Dollar Mistakes, Confessions of a Record Producer, Secrets of a Record Contract, and 100 Answers to 50 Questions on the Music Busine$$.
I joined Tonality.Studio to the NAMM show, and we caught Moses Avalon’s lecture at the Hilton on Saturday, January 18th, at 1000. The lecture was titled Will Tomorrow’s Stars Debut on Facebook? and it was supposed to have a paneled discussion with Moses Avalon. The chairs for the panel were empty, and Moses told the crowd that the representative from Facebook, any representative for that matter, wouldn’t be there. The Facebook representative called Moses days before the scheduled lecture and wanted not only his name off the bill but Facebook’s too. Unfortunately for him, there was very little Moses could do, since the name of the lecture and the name of the panel member were already announced for all of NAMM to see. As mentioned before, there were chairs set up in anticipation for the arrival of the panel.
Moses Avalon let everyone in the room know that the secret around royalties has been kept quiet among who he calls “Silicon Valley.” This includes Google, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, and Facebook. He has an interesting acronym for them, GANDF, that sounds like Gandoff from Lord of the Rings. Moses reports that GANDF has started building a collection of songs they and their creators could use royalty-free. They’re sick of paying royalties for well-known songs and want music from unknown artists to use in their commercials or other adverts. This sounds amazing for any recording artist, but there are some drawbacks.
The first drawback is that they want to buy the rights to the song 100%. Meaning you don’t own your song in any shape or form anymore. You still maintain the writing credits, which is good, since the song will be placed in front of such a huge audience. Moses reported a huge problem with GANDF’s plan for the artist. He said there was nothing in place to ensure that the artists would be credited for the song each time it plays. This means your song could be used by YouTube content creators, placed in Facebook, or Amazon ads, and you’d be completely uncredited. People hearing the song from those platforms and liking them would have to ask the content creator for the name of the song, search for the song, or use a third-party app to detect and find the song.
Once a potential fan finds your Spotify or any other streaming service you have the song on, they could listen to the song there. And you might be thinking, if enough people do this, I could be getting royalty checks. Well, no, you sold the rights to the song 100% to the tech giants and now they’re benefitting and collecting royalties from your Spotify. That’s considering if they let you keep the song on your streaming platforms. Moses mentioned that most companies want to be cool about letting artists keep the song they sold on their streaming platforms, but they don’t have to since they own the rights to the song. GANDF doesn’t want to be seen as uncool, but they may want to use your song exclusively. So, I wouldn’t count on it.
What if your song sold to GANDF fell out of favor or is unpopular on the platform? There’s a possibility that the song could be hidden from their collection and be very hard to find otherwise. There’s also a possibility of the song losing a major presence throughout the Internet and would never recover since the artist no longer owns the rights to the song. There are horror stories about musicians recording entire albums and labels dropping the band before release. The rights to the songs belong to the label, and those songs will never see daylight.
It’s not all doom and gloom Moses said. The average song on Spotify makes is $8 throughout its lifetime. That’s way less than what Moses quoted that GANDF would pay potential artists for their collection. He reported anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000. That’s so much more than most songs on Spotify will ever make and could be an extremely tempting thing for any artist. Moses reported that the money is substantial, but not life-changing. However, it could be worth it if the song isn’t making anything anyway. It’s truly up to the artist to make that decision, and if GANDF decides to make it, so the artist is credited during each play of the song from their collection, the exposure itself could truly have some career-changing effect on the artist.
Could this change the way music is sold? Potentially, yes. This could create major competition with record labels. Moses pointed out that the money is still in signing with record companies. People could make decent money independently, but on average, the stars on record companies are making most of the money. That is of course, if they signed the right contract and are supported by the record company. Could this be away an independent artist can start making excellent money? Yes, potentially. A musician creating bedroom recordings could possibly sell their songs for $20,000 a pop and won’t have to follow any contract other than letting go of the rights to their song. The people doing the scouting for GANDF could possibly have artists as part of their collection and continually buy up their catalog.
Once GANDF decides to havest more songs and artists for their collection, musicians have to weigh the pros and cons of the deals carefully. On one hand, losing the rights to your song could be a horrible feeling, especially if your song falls out of favor and could possibly never be made available again for listeners. But, if you’re okay with that gamble, $20,000 sounds way better than $8, and the possibility of exposure could truly put the artist in the limelight. There isn’t a right choice, but what each individual artist is willing to do. Good luck everyone, if GANDF looks at you for more music for their collection, and thank you, Moses Avalon, for sounding the alarm.
