This post first appeared on Limelight’s blog.

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs … and what’s wrong with that? If you’re planning to use a previously written composition in your efforts, though, you may want to ask: "What constitutes a public domain composition?"

The U.S. Copyright Office defines public domain as: "A work of authorship is in the "public domain" if it is no longer under copyright protection or if it failed to meet the requirements for copyright protection." In the United States, music written before 1923 is generally considered to be public domain.

Many artists and labels who follow the "Golden Rule of Licensing" – if you don’t own or control it, you need a license to use it – know that public domain compositions are one of the few exceptions since tracks within the public domain don’t require a mechanical license or royalty payments made to music publishers.

One important point to consider: even though a song may be found in the public domain, a copyrighted arrangement of that song may exist, which does require a license – so check first. An excellent rule of thumb is, if you used sheet music to learn it, you can often find the copyright information there.

The songs listed below are just a small sample of love songs that are in the public domain.

"I Love You Truly" (Carrie Jacobs Bond)
"Let Me Call You Sweetheart" (Leo Friedman, Beth Slater Whitson)
"I Can’t Tell Why I Love You, But I Do" (Will Cobb, Gus Edwards)
"For Me and My Gal" (George W. Meyer, Edgar Leslie, and E. Ray Goetz
"You Made Me Love You" (James Monaco, Joseph McCarthy)
"Sweet Adeline" (Harry Armstrong, Richard Gerard)

Also numerous classical works, including: "Gymnopedie" (Erik Satie) and "Clair de Lune" (Claude Debussy) are in the public domain.

But, many classic love songs that are presumed to be in the public domain are in fact copyrighted, so make sure to double-check your sources before deciding a track is public domain. PD Info Online is an excellent starting point if the liner notes and copyright information are unavailable. In addition, a simple Google search with "written by" and "published" or "copyright date" alongside the song title often presents information related to the song’s initial copyright date. This is by no means an exhaustive method for determining public domain, but can be helpful.

Here are just a few classic love songs that would require a mechanical license:

"At Last" (Mack Gordon, Harry Warren)
"Can’t Help Falling In Love" (George David Weiss, Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore)
"My Funny Valentine" (Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart)
"Embraceable You" (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin)
"Night and Day" (Cole Porter)
"The Way You Make Me Feel" (Michael Jackson)
"You Are So Beautiful" (Billy Preston and Bruce Fisher)
"I Will Always Love You" (Dolly Parton)
"I’ve Got You Under My Skin" (Cole Porter)
"True Love Ways" (Buddy Holly)

Securing a mechanical license can be a difficult task, but Limelight helps artists, school groups, choirs, record labels, and more in clearing the appropriate rights and paying songwriters and publishers.

If you have any questions about Limelight, don’t hesitate to reach out – their support staff is always willing to help! Email or call (646) 863-6375.

Limelight also has a fairly robust FAQ page

Also check out their “Ask Alex” video FAQ page

This post first appeared on Limelight’s blog.

Public Domain vs. Copyrighted Works – Mechanical Licensing For Cover Songs is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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Here’s another great article on the “behind the scenes” money stories of the music industry. This comes from a posting over at techdirt.

We recently had a fun post about Hollywood accounting, about how the movie industry makes sure even big hit movies “lose money” on paper. So how about the recording industry? Well, they’re pretty famous for doing something quite similar.

Reader Jay pointed out in the comments an article from The Root that goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40.

Here’s the chart that the article shows, though you should read the whole article for all of the details:

Of course, it’s actually even more ridiculous than this report makes it out to be.

Going back ten years ago, Courtney Love famously laid out the details of recording economics, where the label can make $11 million… and the actual artists make absolutely nothing. It starts off with a band getting a massive $1 million advance, and then you follow the money…

Read the rest of the article here…

RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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Once in a while I get curious about the music people find engaging enough to pay for. Here’s what tripping triggers this last week.

iTunes top 10 selling singles and albums of the week ending Aug. 30, 2010:

Singles:

1. “Teenage Dream,” Katy Perry
2. “Dynamite,” Taio Cruz
3. “Just the Way You Are,” Bruno Mars
4. “Love the Way You Lie,” Eminem
5. “I Like It,” Enrique Iglesias
6. “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love,” Usher
7. “Just a Dream,” Nelly
8. “Magic (feat. Rivers Cuomo),” B.o.B
9. “Take It Off,” Ke$ha
10. “Erase Me (feat. Kanye West),” Kid Cudi

Albums:

1. “Teenage Dream,” Katy Perry
2. “Recovery,” Eminem
3. “Burning the Day,” Randy Rogers Band
4. “Back to Me,” Fantasia
5. “Sigh No More,” Mumford & Sons
6. “Versus,” Usher
7. “All Delighted People,” Sufjan Stevens
8. “Harmony,” Never Shout Never
9. “God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise,” The Pariah Dogs, Ray LaMontagne
10. “Zombie,” The Devil Wears Prada

iTunes Top 10 Selling Singles & Albums of the Week Aug. 30, 2010 is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

No related posts.

This is a very interesting post from Greg Sandoval over at Cnet News.

The Internet is a killer of art–at least that’s how a couple of former rock ‘n’ roll gods see it.

John Mellencamp, known for such ’80s hits as “Jack and Diane” and “Hurts So Good,” last week said the Web is the most dangerous creation since the atomic bomb. Stevie Nicks, the Fleetwood Mac songstress, concluded in an interview this week that the “Internet has destroyed rock.”

We have to be free enough with our music to permit people to adapt it for their own purposes. - Jack Holzman (Credit: Warner Music Group)

Jac Holzman, the man who discovered The Doors, founded Elektra Records, and nudged the big recording companies into adopting the compact disc, considers the Web and says: “I think the music industry has a bright future.”

Wow, that’s quite a contrast in views. The difference is Holzman has witnessed most of the industry-shaking technologies during his six decades in the music business–and he’s not panicking.

This year, the 79-year-old celebrates Elektra’s 60th anniversary, and at a life stage when Holzman’s biggest trouble might be choosing the right 9-iron, he’s helping to search for answers to the music industry’s burning digital questions. He has said in the past that there were those in the record business who didn’t think he was relevant any longer, but Holzman is back in the thick of it. Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. sought him out, hired him as a senior adviser, and sees value in the context Holzman can provide.

“I love the way Jac approaches the intersection of music and technology–through the lens of opportunity,” Bronfman said.

At spotting opportunities, Holzman has a notable record. As a 19-year-old, Holzman started Elektra with $300 he received at his bar mitzvah. The label would later go to sign such acts as Queen, Judy Collins, The Stooges, and Jim Morrison. After Holzman sold Electra to Warner Communication (a forerunner of Warner Music Group and Warner Bros. Pictures), he became WCI’s chief technology officer. In that role, he helped oversee some of the company’s film and TV ventures.

When Jack Valenti, the chief of the Motion Picture Association of America, was trying to kill video recorders and comparing them to the Boston Strangler, Holzman was pushing WCI leaders to embrace the home-video market. With cable TV he recognized its potential early and contributed to the development of pay-per-view programming.

In music, Holzman saw the rise of the LP, 8-track tape, DAT, compact disc, MP3, and BitTorrent. After all that, new technologies don’t spook him. On the contrary, he says many of these technologies helped make a lot of artists and industry people rich. When it comes to the Internet and digital distribution, Holzman is confident music labels can capitalize on them too. He says they really don’t have a choice.

Read the rest of the article here…

Music Tech Guru Says Web Is Not The Enemy is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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In the current edition, Rolling Stone Magazine issued a “thank you” letter to all the record label executives.

Enjoy!

And again in plain text format…

A Big Fat Thanks To Record Execs

“Thank you for fighting the good fight against Internet MP3 file-swapping. Because of you, millions of kids will stop wasting time seeking out new bands. No more spreading the word to complete strangers about your artists. No more harmful exposure to thousands of bands via Internet radio either. With any luck they won’t talk about music at all.

“You probably knew you’d make millions by embracing the technology. After all, the kids swapping were like ten times more likely to buy CD’s, making your cause all the more admirable. It must have cost a bundle in future revenue, but don’t worry – computers are just a fad anyway, and the Internet is just plain stupid.”

- Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone Magazine’s Letter To The Record Label Executives is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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This is a great breakdown of the current record deal math done by Cord Jefferson at The Root.

By the math in the article, the average “signed” musician makes $23.40 for every $1,000 of revenue earned by the label.

Think about it in terms of downloads.

Get signed to a label, and sell 1,000 downloads in your first week of release. That’s still pretty respectable for most acts, and can even get you on some charts.

With a coupon code, you can now have two pizzas delivered from Papa John’s.

So why bother? What can a record deal do for you that you can’t put together yourself?

Food for thought. Leave a comment. Tell me what you think.

Source: Spinme.com

How Much Do Musicians Really Make From Record Deals? is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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Ronan C. Murphy

He’s a great engineer/producer and has a great video podcast, Ronan’s Recording Show.

He also conducts the famous Home Recording Bootcamp all over the globe.

I found Ronan’s list of Aphorisms Of Recording, and immediately thought to myself, “What the @$&* is an ‘aphorism’? Is that anything like a ‘trueism’?”

Interwebs to the rescue! (Dictionary.com)

aph·o·rism (āf’ə-rĭz’əm)
n.

1. A tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion; an adage.
2. A brief statement of a principle.

Well, I was close.

Here’s what Ronan has to say about the genesis of this list of adages…

“I began writing this collection of Aphorisms while living in England working on several King Crimson albums with Robert Fripp. Robert had written a large collection of aphorisms about art and life and I decided to write a collection that focused on recording.”

Without further ado…here they are. Definitely pearls of studio wisdom.

• There is no such thing as over-production, only appropriate and inappropriate production.
• Emulation is always a compromise.
• The only endearing elements of emulation are found within the artifacts of its failure.
• The quality of a recording is governed by the performance.
• Sometimes people who know less than you about making records are right.
• There is often an inverse relationship between the sound quality of a pop rock mix and the number of times over 2 the drummer strikes the snare drum per bar.
• The sound of a mix is seldom the most important element.
• Snare drums that ring are pitched instruments. Just like flutes.
• The abstention of studio effects is an effect.
• Guitars over-driven from digital racks or amp emulators will dominate or be submissive to the group. There is seldom a middle ground.
• Great records are made by great people, not great studios.
• If you don’t have the answer to a recording dilemma, the music probably does.
• If the music does not have the answer it is probably not music.
• What you can throw away is often more important than what you can add.
• The factual integrity of a recording decreases exponentially with every mic and tape track used
• There is always a producer(s) on a record.
• Some of the records you loved when you were younger sound horrible and you never noticed.
• You are making the soundtrack to some one else’s life.
• If you require academics to defend your music, you have already lost Music as an ally.
• Recordings without goals usually go no where. Recordings with goals rarely go where you plan, but they get there.
• Good “composition” does not always result in good music.
• Many people mistake “drums sounds” for “production”
• The fact that the “CD” can hold over 73 minutes of music does not mean that the “album” wants to.
• The general pubic thinks records by famous people sound better then those by non-famous people.
• Perfect recordings seldom make for perfect records.
• Production and adding effects are not synonymous.
• Sometimes not participating is the greatest contribution you can make
• A good producer knows that sometimes going away is a contribution.
• Appropriate production is bringing to the project what it needs, clearing away what it doesn’t, and not touching the rest.
• The question “Why?” should be asked before “How?” or “When?”.
• The music is more important than any one in the studio.

While we’re at it, here’s the latest episode of Ronan’s Recording Show as of the date of this post:

Ronan C. Murphy’s Aphorisms On Recording is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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Stu Venable, a long time listener to the Project Studio Network podcast, has had a song picked up by the Dockers clothing company for a commercial during this years big game, Super Bowl XLIV.

The song is called I Wear No Pants.

I asked Stu if he wouldn’t mind telling us all a little bit about how this happened. Here’s his very interesting report…

In November of last year, I received a phone call from an advertising agency wanting to purchase a song I wrote, “I Wear No Pants” for use in an advertising campaign for Dockers, to begin during the 2010 Super Bowl.

The deal went through, contracts were signed and I sent them the score for the song. A preview DVD of the spot is being Fed-Ex’d to me as we speak, and my wife and I are hosting a Super Bowl party for the first time in our lives.

Almost as an after-thought, I asked my contact at the ad agency how they found the song. Our band has never pursued placements in commercials (or anything else), as we’ve been content performing at the local Renaissance Faire and a few other local venues.

She told me that they hit upon us during a brainstorming session when someone Googled “I Wear No Pants,” and they found a video of us, taken by a fan, performing the song live at the Faire.

In recent weeks, we’ve been working to make sure that anyone who sees the ad and wants to hear the original version of the song (or find out more about the band) can do so easily.

This has included purchasing the url http://IWearNoPants.com and asking our fan-base to act as a virtual street team to put as many references to the band, Dockers, I Wear No Pants and the Wear the Pants campaign in the blogs, Facebook and Twitter posts and anyplace else they can. We also made a video of the song, which was posted on Youtube a few weeks go.

You can’t help but run through all the possible scenarios of something like this. Last year, nearly 100 million people in the United States watched the Super Bowl. If one percent of those people buy the song…you get the idea.

Here’s the video of the soon-to-be-well-known-song, I Wear No Pants.

Here’s teaser for the actual Docker’s commercial featuring I Wear No Pants:

You can find more about Stu’s band here: http://PoxyBoggards.com

Here’s Stu’s podcast: http://AngryFolk.com

From high atop the PSN towers, we proclaim throughout the land:

Congratulations Stu on I Wear No Pants!

“I Wear No Pants” – PSN Listener Gets Song On During Super Bowl XLIV is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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Wait…what?

Breaking news from Tech Dirt:

from the can’t-listen-without-paying-up dept…

We’ve been detailing how the various collection societies around the globe have been trotting out all sorts of dubious reasoning to try to get more people to pay up for a license. In the US, ASCAP has been particularly ridiculous, seeking public performance licenses for (legally licensed) ringtones as well as the 30-second previews you find on music download stores like iTunes. ASCAP has already succeeded in forcing YouTube to pay up as well. Of course, the end result has actually been harming many up and coming songwriters and musicians, as more and more venues are choosing to forego music entirely, because it’s just not worth having to pay up the fees that ASCAP charges.

In the latest overreach, sent in by reader faceless, ASCAP is demanding a licensing fee from a venue that has the video game Guitar Hero for people to play. While the venue does sometimes have live musicians, it has purposely chosen to only allow original music (no covers) from artists and songwriters not covered by ASCAP, to avoid having to pay the fee. As the venue owner notes, it’s ridiculous to think that the venue should have to pay for a license just to let people play Guitar Hero, saying, “patrons are paying for the entertainment of the game not for the listening value of the music.”

But, of course, that’s not how ASCAP views any of these things, insisting that the value itself comes from the music, and thus the songwriters must absolutely be paid. Of course, this isn’t the first time ASCAP has come down hard on music video games. Earlier this year, it insisted that the video game companies themselves should pay performance licensing fees as well — so in this case it looks like they’re trying to double or triple dip.

Of course, the most likely end result? The venue will drop the game, and fewer people will hear the music. This harms everyone — the songwriters, the musicians, ASCAP and the venue. But ASCAP seems to think it’s the right move. This is why more and more musicians are recognizing that what’s good for ASCAP is not good for songwriters.

Click here to read the original article and see the user comments…

ASCAP Now Demanding License From Venues That Let People Play Guitar Hero is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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Ken Scott

Engineered:

• America – America
• The Beatles – Magical Mystery Tour – White Album
• Jeff Beck – Truth
• David Bowie – Man Of Words, Man of Music (Space Oddity) – The Man Who Sold The World
• Duran Duran – Thank You – Pop Trash
• George Harrison – All Things Must Pass
• Elton John – Madman Across The Water – Honky Chateau – Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player [Grammy Nominated]
• Lindisfarne – Fog On The Tyne
• Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds Of Fire
• Harry Nilsson – Son Of Schmilsson [Grammy Nominated]

Also: Pink Floyd – John Lennon – Ringo Starr – The Rolling Stones – Joan Armatrading – I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing ( Coke Ad ) – Lou Reed – Procul Harum etc etc

Produced and Engineered:

• Jeff Beck – There And Back
• David Bowie – Hunky Dory – Ziggy Stardust – Aladdin Sane – Pinups -
• dada – Puzzle
• Stanley Clarke – Stanley Clarke – Journey To Love [Grammy Nominated] – Schooldays
• Level 42 – True Colours
• Devo – Duty Now For The Future
• Mahavishnu Orchestra – Emerald Visions Of The Pure Beyond [Grammy Nominated]
• Supertramp – Crime Of The Century [Grammy Nominated] – Crisis, What Crisis?
• The Tubes – Young And Rich

And many, many more!

Here’s a really nice two-part interview with Ken where he talks about his past experience and his latest project.

PART 1

PART 2

Why Not Spend a Few Moments With Legendary Producer and Engineer Ken Scott? is a post from: Home Recording Studio Guru

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