dua lipa – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "dua lipa"

A Swiftian Solution To Some Of Copyright’s Problems

from the getting-past-the-gatekeepers dept

Copyright is generally understood to be for the benefit of two groups of people: creators and their audience. Given that modern copyright often acts against the interests of the general public – forbidding even the most innocuous sharing of copyright material online – copyright intermediaries such as publishers, recording companies and film studios typically place great emphasis on how copyright helps artists. As Walled Culture the book spells out in detail (digital versions available free) the facts show otherwise. It is extremely hard for creators in any field to make a decent living from their profession. Mostly, artists are obliged to supplement their income in other ways. In fact, copyright doesn’t even work well for the top artists, particularly in the music world. That’s shown by the experience of one of the biggest stars in the world of music, Taylor Swift, reported here by The Guardian:

Swift is nearing the end of her project to re-record her first six albums – the ones originally made for Big Machine Records – as a putsch to highlight her claim that the originals had been sold out from under her: creative and commercial revenge served up album by album. Her public fight for ownership carried over to her 2018 deal with Republic Records, part of Universal Music Group (UMG), where an immovable condition was her owning her future master recordings and licensing them to the label.

It seems incredible that an artist as successful as Swift should be forced to re-record some of her albums in order to regain full control over them – control she lost because of the way that copyright works, splitting copyright between the written song and its performance (the “master recording”). A Walled Culture post back in 2021 explained that record label contracts typically contain a clause in which the artist grants the label an exclusive and total license to the master.

Swift’s need to re-record her albums through a massive but ultimately rather pointless project is unfortunate. However, some good seems to be coming of Swift’s determination to control both aspects of her songs – the score and the performance – as other musicians, notably female artists, follow her example:

Olivia Rodrigo made ownership of her own masters a precondition of signing with Geffen Records (also part of UMG) in 2020, citing Swift as a direct inspiration. In 2022, Zara Larsson bought back her recorded music catalogue and set up her own label, Sommer House. And in November 2023, Dua Lipa acquired her publishing from TaP Music Publishing, a division of the management company she left in early 2022.

It’s a trend that has been gaining in importance in recent years, as more musicians realize that they have been exploited by recording companies through the use of copyright, and that they have the power to change that. The Guardian article points out an interesting reason why musicians have an option today that was not available to them in the past:

This recalibration of the rules of engagement between artists and labels is also a result of the democratisation of information about the byzantine world of music contract law. At the turn of the 2000s, music industry information was highly esoteric and typically confined to the pages of trade publications such as Billboard, Music Week and Music & Copyright, or the books of Donald S Passman. Today, industry issues are debated in mainstream media outlets and artists can use social media to air grievances or call out heinous deal terms.

Pervasive use of the Internet means that artists’ fans are more aware of how the recording industry works, and thus better able to adjust their purchasing habits to punish the bad behavior, and reward the good. One factor driving this is that musicians can communicate directly to their fans through social media and other platforms. They no longer need the marketing departments of big recording companies to do that, which means that the messages to fans are no longer sanitized or censored.

This is another great example of how today’s digital world makes the old business models of the copyright industry redundant and vulnerable. That’s great news, because it is a step on the path to realizing that creators – whatever their field – don’t need copyright to thrive, despite today’s dogma that they do. What they require is precisely what innovative artists like Taylor Swift have achieved – full control over all aspects of their own creations – coupled with the Internet’s direct channels to their fans that let them turn that into fair recompense for their hard work.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published on Walled Culture.

Filed Under: control, dua lipa, music, olivia rodrigo, recording contracts, taylor swift, zara larsson

from the well-look-at-that dept

You may have noticed a whole bunch of stories about copyright lawsuits lately against famous musicians for having songs that sound just kind of like some other songs. I’d been meaning to write up something talking about all of these stories about how Ed Sheeran is supposedly a “magpie” who “borrows” songs, or about how Dua Lipa was sued not once, but twice, claiming her song “Levitating” infringes on the copyrights of others. Or maybe about how it took Katy Perry eight years to finally have an appeals court note that she didn’t actually infringe on someone else’s copyright.

But then I came across this moderately infuriating Guardian article talking about a few of these cases, and saying that “music industry figures” are claiming that all of these lawsuits show how copyright needs to change because “making music is so different to how it was 50 years ago.”

Hayleigh Bosher, associate dean of intellectual property law at Brunel University, who researches the music industry, said “the law needs to move with the times” as “making music is so different to how it was 50 years ago”.

She added: If Sheeran loses, I imagine we will see even more cases. I don’t think copyright is doing its job properly if songwriters are afraid, that’s stifling creativity.”

And, yes, obviously, copyright law needs to change. These lawsuits are crazy, and we’ve been saying that for a long while now.

But there seems to be something worth noting when the industry is only starting to come around on this because of a bunch of lawsuits targeting famous white songwriters. Because for all the talk about how “music is so different” today, we went through another period of time when a whole bunch of brilliant musicians were sued over copyright infringement… and the response from the industry was a lot more muted.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s there was a flood of sampling lawsuits — almost all of which were targeting hip hop artists. And then you had crazy legal rulings like Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films in which a court announced “get a license or do not sample” and (ridiculously) “we do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way.”

But did we see the music industry screaming about how we needed to fix copyright laws back then? Nope. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend watching Kembrew McLeod’s one hour documentary Copyright Criminals (which, apparently, is now available on YouTube), which does such a great job of showing how copyright basically destroyed a whole genre of hip hop music, but the industry didn’t much care, because hip hop involved mostly artists of color, rather than white pop music.

One great line in that documentary is that after someone says that hip hop artists sampling other musicians is “lazy,” someone notes that it’s not that different than saying a photographer is lazier than a painter because they just snap a picture of what’s already there, rather than painting it from scratch.

The simple fact is that copyright law has gotten in the way of creativity for ages. Creativity has always been based on building on the works of people who came before you. Sometimes it’s homage. Sometimes it’s appropriation. Sometimes it’s just because there are only so many ways certain notes can be played together.

But if people are getting sued over creating new music, and musicians are now afraid of getting sued for making music, then it’s a huge problem. And it was a huge problem in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and today. Perhaps it’s good that more people are realizing how broken the system is and how it’s stifling creativity, but it does seem at least slightly infuriating that it’s only once it’s famous white pop singers are facing the same thing that black hip hop artists faced in the 80s and 90s that its treated as a “real” problem.

Filed Under: copyright, dua lipa, ed sheeran, katy perry, sampling, songwriting