Hello, fellow Sneakers! This week it’s David and Ian alone at Sneaky Dragon HQ to discuss pie shortages, the Play-Doh rip-off, bad food combinations, problems with the whole round table design, power pop, Mini-Pops and chipmunk pop. They try to figure out how song publishing works and we learn once again that Dave doesn’t know what you mean.

We wrote and asked our friend David M. how the heck rights to song performance works and this was his reply:

“Any musician can do any song they like, but the song publisher and the songwriter have some ability to block versions they don’t like, if they feel it’s damaging to the song (parodies get some special consideration).
For movies or TV, the songwriter gets royalties, by agreement with the copyright holders of the production. For instance, I was paid $400 for my signature on a contract with Suzanne Tabata for the use of “Mindless Aggression†in “Bloodied But Unbowedâ€, which was an amount $100 less than it should have been to cover all rights for video releases as well, but she asked if the lesser amount was okay and I said yes. She needed contracts with all the songwriters with songs in her film, because she was getting government funding and needed everything done on the up-and-up, but clearly under normal circumstances the details of the necessary songwriter contracts are negotiable in both directions. “Velvet Goldmine†was refused permission outright by David Bowie for the use of his songs, for example, and I doubt that “The Life Aquatic†paid him a huge amount, but he was agreeable.
If the songwriter has a contract with a song publisher, that would determine where the royalties go. John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t have sufficient control over the songs they wrote to stop Robert Stigwood from making the Bee Gees’ movie with new recordings of the songs. The ownership of the actual recordings used is another issue, of course, but in the case of something like “Bloodied But Unbowedâ€, there weren’t any cover versions for anybody to worry about.
The Brazilian guy would have a separate contract, with nothing to do with song royalties involved, but the contract would use his actual name, unless maybe there was only one obvious ‘the Brazilian guy’.”

I think we can all agree that once again, Ian was right!

Don’t forget that if you’d like it’s still possible to vote for Sneaky Dragon in the Georgia Straight’s Best of Vancouver poll. You only have to answer thirty questions to get us a clean third place finish!

Thanks for listening.