Oasis are back together, at the top of the charts, and back on tour. Amidst all this, there’s talk again about how artists can make money, especially after that Ticketmaster fiasco. This isn’t a major issue for the likes of Oasis, who can sell out stadiums.
But for smaller artists, this is the issue. Now, it is no great secret that catalogue music is stifling new music. Nor is it a great secret that the new retirement package for songwriters is to sell their publishing rights for eye-watering sums. Bob Dylan did it, Bruce Springsteen did it, and Noel Gallagher is almost certainly about to do it… even Kevin Parker did it.
This means that the big businesses that drive the music industry, the labels and investment companies that control incredible portfolios of musical intellectual property, have a vested interest in promoting the old over the new.
Reports are that the big labels have spent billions in the past few years buying up song catalogues: 500 million for Springsteen and 250 million for Dylan, just to name a few. With that sort of money invested, the labels need to make a return on their investment, but the problem is that this will almost certainly come at the expense of investment in new music.
So, with all that in mind, what I want to talk about in this column is… copyright. Because I think copyright is killing creativity. It’s definitely good business, at least for big business, but it absolutely murders creativity and not just for music.
Think of Disney. As a studio, Disney made its name on adaptations of works primarily in the public domain: Snow White, Cinderella, Robin Hood, and so on. Yet, they now zealously protect their own copyrights, even going so far as to sue daycare centres for painting Disney characters on the walls. And it should be noted that a great many of those characters are actually in the public domain.
In the world of music, there are The Beatles, who shamelessly borrowed from Bach. Then there’s the Stones, who borrowed from the great blues musicians of the 40s and 50s or Led Zeppelin, who borrowed from everyone. Nowadays, a suspicious cowbell is enough to trigger a lawsuit from Marvin Gaye‘s estate.
Just this past week, Miley Cyrus found herself on the receiving end of a copyright lawsuit over her hit song Flowers.
The suit argues she stole elements of the 2013 Bruno Mars hit, When I Was Your Man. But, crucially, the lawsuit is not coming from Bruno Mars; it’s coming from a private equity firm called Tempo Music Investments. They specialise in investing in, well, music, and so they bought a percentage of the copyright to Bruno Mars’s song from one of his co-writers.
This means we’re now in a situation where a bunch of people with no actual connection to the writing of a song are suing another artist for plagiarism. This kind of abuse of copyright law is clearly not what it was designed to project and has nothing to do with legal protections for artists and songwriters.
It’s worth bearing in mind that if these kinds of lawsuits were around 40, 50, or 60 years ago, then a plethora of classic artists would’ve been wiped out by litigation.
Just think of everyone who borrowed from Good Time by Chic; that alone would have led to lawsuits for Queen, Blondie and The Sugarhill Gang. Toto would probably have been sued for lifting the Fool In The Rain shuffle from Led Zeppelin for Rosanna, and Nirvana absolutely would have been sued for borrowing large parts of Smells Like Teen Spirit from Boston’s More Than A Feeling. However, there were no lawsuits in all these cases because artists tend to recognise that their art is built on their influences and that borrowing ideas isn’t the same as outright theft.
Some cases are, of course, worthy of lawsuits.
I don’t think anyone who listens to My Sweet Lord by George Harrison and He’s So Fine by The Chiffons side-by-side is surprised that it ended in a lawsuit. But in cases like Miley Cyrus, surely we have to step back and ask, “Who is this actually serving?” Because it’s not the artists, and it certainly isn’t the listening public.
I see people complain that many songs are just covers with new lyrics or heavily based on samples, but the advantage of this approach is that it allows labels to exploit their back catalogues and makes the lines of copyright clear.
If we want new music and fresh sounds, then artists need not be afraid that they’ll be sued because a melody they wrote is just a fraction too close to something owned by groups like Tempo Music Investments.
Copyright is, of course, important. It allows artists to be protected from imitators profiting from their original ideas.
However, copyright should not last forever and should not be punitively protected. New art is always built on the shoulders of old art. But when publishing catalogues can belong to corporations, surely we can admit copyright is not about protecting art or artists but about making money.
Up-and-coming songwriters should be able to borrow from those who came before without fear of lawsuits, and record labels should be forced to invest in new music and not just endlessly recycle back catalogues for easy profits.
Copyright is still essential for protecting artists, but it can’t come at the expense of new art. Maybe the answer is shorter copyrights and certainly not letting them be so readily transferred to big business.
And maybe, just maybe, more artists who’ve already made more money than anyone could spend in two lifetimes should be willing to embrace the public domain—especially those who borrowed so liberally from others on their way up.
