Royalties! What's mine is mine, what's yours is yours - most of the time

The joys of music publishing

                                  Pennies and pounds?

If you can, and you're West Midlands based, catch a John Mostyn music biz session. Last week's, in south Brum, was a belter. There's another in January, this time in north(ish) Birmingham; details are below. John told amazing music publishing tales. Some were jaw-dropping; some hilarious. And some were very sad.

I'm not retelling the stories. If you want to hear them, go to the next session; check his Facebook page. I'll be there for more info, anecdotes, and tales of scurrilousness and nobility.

I left thinking about one little corner of the royalty distribution world: how local musos can get local airplay, but miss out on payments. It's absolutely not right. But no matter how fair distributors PRS (the Performing Rights Society) sets out to be, the system fails these musicians. It's not perfect, not by a long chalk. 

The Dumb team: One Beat at a time

There's a sweet meeting of worlds coming up in two weeks. At the Birmingham Institute, new boys Jaws, Dumb and The Magic Gang do 2014 Indie. In the main room, UB40 are on, for several nights. The old and the new; a nice coincidence. One Beat's Ian Light agrees.

One Beat? Most people know the name from the very successful One Beat Saturday and Sunday day-long gigs they've run summer times in Birmingham, focusing on new local talent. The next One Beat is in July, expanded to a two day bash, this year working with urgently cool on-trend promoters This Is Tmrw. The complete bill is yet to be released, but I expect a speedy sell-out: the mac arena venue is fabulous, if a bit small.

One Beat has a longer history than open air gigs. It's a record company and a management outfit, with one band on the books: Dumb. One Beat's Ian Light has a lot on his hands.

Don Fardon: whatever you do, read the contract first

Despite selling well over ten million records, Don Fardon never received a single penny in royalties: the classic story of poor contracts, lousy royalties and little or no advice. Then, things changed.

Pop is the preserve of the young. It's sold aggressively to successive target generations. The guys who sell it need a steady supply of fresh compliant talent to sell to each new crop of consumers. Implicit is this is the idea that the musicians who benefit from this process should play nice, and move over to make way for the latest newcomers. Don't make a fuss once the money's been made... just, er, go away, there's a good boy. 

Fine for the business, but I have yet to meet any performer who thinks even remotely along those lines. People may have long or short music careers, for all sorts of reasons. But, without exception, the creative motivation is to make and perform music to fire imaginations, to touch audiences... to do good. Age has nothing to do with that. And being casually written off by music industry suits isn’t on the radar either.