This fourth blog post on Your Jazz Career is part two of a series called ‘The Antidote’ which aims to strengthen your music career against sudden crises. Something unexpected will always happen. It prompts the question: how do you minimize the impact of these disruptive changes? We all need an antidote for uncertain times.
The second music career strategy in this series is about managing your four different roles as a recording artist. When dealing with copyrights you are in fact a composer, performer, publisher and record label all in one. This article highlights the importance of composing your own work vs being a studio session musician. Additionally, I sing some praises for being a DIY publisher.
Creative Assets: Recordings
As a jazz musician, the two most common assets are your performances and recordings. Managing your creative assets well will generate future and passive income. Passive income is income generated in perpetuity requiring minimal to no action from the recipient which leaves more time for other things, like making music. Hmm, sounds like a good topic for a future blog post 🙂
Over the years your albums form a body of work, or in other words, your artistic portfolio. This is who you are as an artist to the outside world. This portfolio will attract fans promoters and press, which will generate more opportunities and income.
As a coach and venue director, I’ve seen the difference it makes to the careers of jazz artists that manage their portfolio (discography) well and those that don’t. Applying a long-term approach by carving out new creative assets makes your career in the long run more sustainable and profitable. Your body of work – a so-called tangible asset – starts to speak for itself. You will have more merch to sell at performances. Copyrights – a so-called intangible asset – will start to exponentially multiply your income streams. Promoters will trust your quality of work and will book you more often. Record labels prefer signing artists that are songwriters. Finding an artist manager will be easier when you sell annually 10.000 records than when you have only one album to sell from 2011. And the list goes on.
Managing your creative assets as a jazz artist is vital. Now, from this introduction, let’s analyse being a recording artist in more depth.
A short introduction to music publishing
As a DIY professional recording artist, you have four roles to fulfil. Each of these four roles requires separate knowledge and skills and will have a major impact on your potential future earnings. As a recording artist you are in fact a:
- Writer/Composer
- Publisher
- Artist/Performer (Studio session-musician)
- Record Label
How did I come to these four roles? There is a legal basis for this in international copyright law.
The definition of a sound recording according to the U.S. Copyright Office is: “A work that results from the fixation of a series of musical, spoken or other sounds, but not including the sounds accompanying a motion picture or other audio-visual work.” This would translate concretely into the master-mix of your recording. This is your intellectual property as a musician.
A song has two important aspects:
- Composition (melody + chords) – the PA copyright (performing arts)
- Sound recording of a composition – the SR copyright (sound recording)
Both the composition and the sound recording each have two legal stakeholders:
- Composition: the Writer/composer and the Publisher
- Sound recording: the Artist/Performer and the Record Label
In the core, the difference between a record label and a publisher is that a publisher links song to companies and other artists. Its catalogue is songs. Music publishing is the commercial exploitation of a composition. A record label links artists to audiences. Its catalogue is artists, which is called a labels’ artist roster.
Jazz & Composition rights
Jazz can be a bit tricky when it comes to ownership of the composition. In an art form based on instant composition and group interplay, how do you determine the copyrights? Sometimes a bandleader might only bring a sketch to the session, like Miles Davis famously did on Kind of Blue. The groupmembers then add their colors and choices to construct the final composition together as ‘co-composers’. Basically, you have two choices. The most used one is asking your fellow-musicians to sign a copyright agreement before entering the studio. Ideally, it not only addresses how shares of the music will be divided but also clarifies issues such as ownership of the group’s name and recordings. Another legal route is to create a ‘Joint Work’. This means: “work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole.” Here you judge the final result afterwards and assign copyrights to those musicians that made an important contribution to the final composition as co-composers. This will be divided in equal parts. The latter strategy can be murkier. My advice would be to always start recording with clarity on the business aspects. (Sources: JazzTimes and Lawyerdrummer.)
Writer/Composer vs Artist/Performer
Here I separate being a composer or performer in the recording context as individual careers to visualize its potential long-term financial impact.
Being a session-musician
The term ‘Artist/Performer’ means the studio-performance by the musicians needed to record the song. As a career choice, it translates to being a (fulltime) studio session-musician.
There are many jazz musicians who don’t compose their own music but work as session-musicians. Playing standards is a beautiful jazz tradition and there is so much amazing music to choose from and reinterpretate. I get it. However, with physical record sales being low, income derived from records doesn’t justify anymore huge recording budgets.
As a musician for hire you will mostly earn a flat fee for your services. Unions organize rates for musicians, but despite their best efforts, you’ll often encounter a €25 p/hour rate. A far cry from the fees your predessors earned in the 1980’s.
Legally you are entitled to any royalties generated from the use of these recordings. That is why the producer or composer will ask you to agree to a flat session fee and sign a session musician’s release (copyright agreement). Which are common practice and the industry standard. This means zero future income from record sales despite your great solo making all the difference. The famous example in question being Van Halen’s guitar solo in Michael Jackson’s rock tune ‘Beat It’. You guessed it, Eddie literally got zero dollars after its release but, of course, eternal glory.
Want to find out more about becoming a Studio-Musician? Read this article at Careers in Music.
Writer/Composer
Being a composer who owns their own copyrights puts you in full control of your music and its commercial usage from which you will receive a 100% of all related earnings. You should aim to build your own creative assets (albums) to generate future income (royalties). That way you build a passive income stream from streaming, album sales (digital/physical), licensing your music and more.
So, be a session-musician. You will grow musically, expand your network of artists, producers and studios, and will have an additional income stream. However, don’t make it your only career choice. Also develop your composition skills and start recording your own music.
Being a DIY Publisher
Most artists only think about signing with- or starting their own record label. However, that is only half of the story and of your potential income streams. The other half is related to music publishing. And, music publishing is one of the least understood, and most important, aspects of music business.
It is about protecting your work (copyrights), affiliating with several PROs for different royalties (Performance Right Organisations), clearing your songs (so they are registered and findable online for potential users), and perhaps even starting your own publishing company when outside interests in your work grow to a significant level.
I recommend any artist to begin their music career this way and learn about self-publishing. Later on, you can decide, based upon a deeper understanding of music publishing how and with whom you will partner up.
Repeat this mantra after me: “I will diversify my income streams and will build creative assets.” Now, repeat it again.
TIP: need an easy to read guide into the complex world of music publishing? Read “The Plain & Simple Guide to Music Publishing” by Randall D. Wixen (4th Edition, 2020). It’s down to earth, up-to-date, a fun read and it has a chapter on DIY.
Pieter Schoonderwoerd
Your Jazz Career
Find an empowering ebook on developing your artistic vision and writing a compelling artist biography here.
I’ve been coaching jazz artists for three years to achieve their creative and professional ambitions. If you are interested in a personal coaching session, you can read more about it here.