SiriusXM settles lawsuit on royalties for songs made before ’72

New York Times via SF Gate ^ | Saturday, June 27, 2015 | no byline

[a fool in paradise]

People still read old books too.

It isn’t always nostalgia (but for some it is).

[trebb]

...and when I found out what crap SiriusXM played, I dropped them after only a day and got my money back

I bought a new car and have 6 months of free SiriusXM. Listened to about a half hour so far and enjoyed about 4 minutes of it. I put a few thousand tunes on a USB drive and it should take me a couple months to listen to it and hear music I actually enjoy enough to select it...won't renew this SIRIUS any more than I did with the last new car trial I got.

[a fool in paradise]

Will The Circle Be Unbroken is from 1907. It’s been declared to be in the public domain so no publishing rights remain on that old chestnut.

Good Morning To All is from 1893. The melody was ‘borrowed”/stolen for “Happy Birthday To You” and Warner Brothers claims that they still own publishing on Happy Birthday up until 2035 even though the birthday lyrics with that melody were published in 1912.

The way song publishing rights are handled is a crock.

[Fiji Hill]

I like This Bojangles.

[Fiji Hill]

There are two songs entitled "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," but they share the same melody. The first version is a gospel song co-written by the great Methodist hymn writer Charles Gabriel and English evangelist Ada Habershon in 1907. Unfortunately, there's no decent recording of it on Youtube.

The country-western song, originally titled "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" dates from the 1920's.

[AlaskaErik]

I hope you are listening. This is music.

I'm listening all right...to today's music. The Pulse on Sirius/XM channel 15.

[cva66snipe]

The version NGDB sang is credited to AP Carter who was wrongly credited with writing a couple of other songs as well. The Carters were from the western edge of Virginia.

My wife was born in 1950 and her grandmother who mainly raised her was a piano and voice teacher in Knoxville and rented space from a local piano store for her classes. My wife remembered one day a woman came in to the store and sat down and began "banging" as her grandmother called it on a piano & writing down words. She said look at her. LOL. The woman playing was Maybelle Carter.

It was sad in a way. My wife's grandmother came from the first family that settled in & founded Sevier County, TN but despite her mountain heritage she did not like Folk nor Bluegrass aka Mountain Music. She taught classical music and voice for Opera mainly. Even her daughter though whom despite lessons could not read a note of music could play good enough to be the church pianist.

Lot's of older & well known musicians from this region can't read music. Like Dolly Parton who has written hundreds of songs including the tunes but can't read music. She didn't get her start from Porter Wagonner either. She got her start as a teenager on a Knoxville TV station being on a variety show ran by a local Politico/Grocer.

[cva66snipe]

The way song publishing rights are handled is a crock.

Very much so. I can understand listing a credit as author so plagiarism can't be an issue, but century old rights and usage fees/permissions? That's a crock. There needs to be a much more reasonable expiration time frame. By 25 years most of the money and fame have been gotten out of such works. The result of the current laws is contrary to the reason behind the intent of the original laws to start with.

[Stand Watch Listen]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bRJLkNqNXI&feature=player_embedded... Will The Circle Be Unbroken Vol.2

Johnny Cash
Roy Acuff
Bruce Hornsby
Paulette Carlson
Michael M. Murphey
Earl Scruggs
Roy Huskey Jr.
Randy Scruggs
Ricky Skaggs
Chris Hillman
Jimmy Martin
Levon Helm
Emmylou Harris
John Hiatt
Roger McGuinn
Bela Fleck
Sam Bush
Mark O’connor
Rosanne Cash
Jerry Douglas
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Chet Atkins
Marty Stuart
Vassar Clements

[cva66snipe]

Thanks.

[a fool in paradise]

The author rights were often falsely under the name of the producer/promoter (sometimes using the real name and sometimes under an alias).

Since the money is in the publishing, it was kickback for the likes of Alan Freed and others.

It doesn’t surprise me that Big Media would screw the performers and undercut a musicians’ lawsuit with their own ‘settlement’ and negotiate not to pay artists for another 2 years (or pay them for 10+ years of back dated wrongs).

[a fool in paradise]

Mobsters got the Jerry Leiber publishing rights to rock and roll. Hung him out a window and coerced him into signing over the rights for past hits, they paid him a dollar for his troubles.

He made money afterwards by buying other peoples’ publishing catalogs (like the rights to Somewhere Over The Rainbow).

Those reaping the rewards were not the authors and often it was by ill gotten means. Look up what Allen Klein did to the Beatles and the Stones.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1197709/Monster-rock-Allen-Klein-swindled-The-Stones-broke-The-Beatles-rock-n-rolls-ruthless-Svengali.html

Perpetuity of the rights does nothing to benefit the creators or the performers (who must continue to pay some third party to perform their own material live).

The way the music business works nowadays, there is more money in the older hits than there is in all but a handful of new artists. Even the older performers who make the top 20 concert draws are playing material that is 30-50 years old even though they continue writing and recording new albums.

This system is stifling ‘progress’ or at least contemporary artist development and as already noted, it isn’t benefiting the older ‘hit’ artists who’s work is heard in so many places.

[a fool in paradise]

With some ‘traditional’ songs, the author will never be known.

Even ‘historians’/’researchers’ like Alan Lomax muddied the waters of history by knowingly falsely assigning authorship to persons such as Leadbelly to give him some steady income.

[a fool in paradise]

Whatever floats your boat

These artists are the 2000s answer to Gerardo (Rico Suave was a #1 hit in the 90s).

Today
15. Kelly Clarkson “Heartbeat Song”
14. Maroon 5 “Sugar”
13. Vance Joy “Riptide”
12. Sam Smith “I’m Not The Only One”
11. Taylor Swift “Blank Space”
10. Big Data “Dangerous”
9. George Ezra “Budapest”
8. Fall Out Boy “Centuries”
7. Sheppard “Geronimo”
6. The Script “No Good In Goodbye”
5. Ella Henderson “Ghost”
4. OneRepublic “I Lived”
3. Imagine Dragons “I Bet My Life”
2. Ed Sheeran “Thinking Out Loud”
1. Hozier “Take Me To Church”

http://blog.siriusxm.com/2015/02/16/the-pulse-2000s-today-top-15-countdown/

Even the defenders of Hozier admit he’s only got one song in him and it isn’t that special.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11462957

[AlaskaErik]

Now you’re talking my kind of music!

[a fool in paradise]

There apparently isn’t much of that kind of music. The same 20 songs have been in rotation for over a year, spun every hour every day. One note johnnies. Get to the end of the 20 song list, play ‘em again and again and again...

This week’s Davy Crockett cap to be forgotten next decade.

If it wear evidence of a music trend with vitality, there would be an explosion of acts.

In the chickified pop country world, the women 14-35 who test well surveys of what the public should hear, they can’t even recognize that they are being sold the same exact product again and again and again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o

[Rastus]

I’ve heard of seven of those artists, and none of the songs. Music pretty much ended for me in the early ‘90s, with just a few exceptions here and there that I found later. There’s enough music for me to still discover from the ‘20s through the ‘80s, so I don’t waste a lot of time with this modern stuff that sounds like disposable garbage to me.

My two complaints about SXM: very small playlists, and radio edits/talking over the songs. I’m paying for it. Is it too much to ask for the full album version of, say, Sweet Child o’ Mine (I just heard the chopped up version)?

[kjam22]

It hasn’t changed. They play the original versions...

[a fool in paradise]

You aren’t missing much. Some restaurants and other publicly accessible places play the Sirus station. Wouldn’t necessarily know the song titles though.

If you want to hear songs about Uma Thurman, James Dean stares, clothes and fashion, over appropriated Munsters’ theme song riffs, that’s the sort of pop culture blender you’d be subjected to.

[cva66snipe]

Thanks. I read the article and understand it a little better. There have been a lot of artist not only loosing their rights unknowingly in a lot of cases to their work but final insult of having their work credited to someone who had no part in it. The writers and singer both deserve their pay and credit. Recording companies have also been dictating choices of what we are allowed too hear vs what the artist would like to record {and likely better material} for decades. That was true in Rock and Country music. Some have broken away making their own labels and producing their own recordings.