Permission to record song: Record Producer Tips
This guide is useful for anyone wanting to know how to get a permission to record a song. Before you read further, this guide is helpful for any of the cases below:
a. You are planning to cover a song which is written by someone else but it is not released (or not popular).
b. You are planning to record a song which is written by your artist.
c. You’re planning to re-record a popular song written by a popular writer.
Let’s examine what music rights are exploited:
a. Mechanical rights – this is right to reproduce the song in the physical medium such as CD, Video Tape, cassette tape, etc. If you exploited this right, you need to contact the music publisher of the song and asked for mechanical license.
b. Printed sheet rights – this is the right to reproduce the lyrics of the song.
Those are the only two possible rights exploited when you are going to record a song. The “printed sheet” rights assumes you are going to include the song lyrics your production. However this can be skipped in most cases.
If you are record producer, you are in-charge of producing the album that includes songs owned and NOT owned by your artist.
For songs owned by your artist; you simply need a written mechanical license from your artist. For the payment it needs to be arranged and there is no standard rule.
In US, the mechanical royalty rates are around 9.1 cents per song (http://www.songwriteruniverse.com/mechanical.html ). If the artist is writing the whole 10 songs in the album, the mechanical royalty due is 91 cents or 0.91 US dollar. If there are about 1,000,000 albums to be reproduced, the total amount of royalty due is:
0.91 US dollar x 1,000,000 = 910,000 US dollars.
The question is: Are you as a record producer going to pay that amount of royalty? The answer is NO. In fact, the recording label (not the record producer) will be the one to pay for that royalty amount.
The record producer is only hired to produce the recordings, even the artist is hired by the label to perform. Your job as a record producer is to make sure the mechanical license is executed by the label and you have a “go” permission to record the song.
Another popular question: If the artist is not financed by a major recording label, and they are the ones financing their own records but hire you as the producer, do you still need mechanical license?
There is no need to secure mechanical license because they themselves (the artist) are financing the recording session and selling the album, UNLESS you as a record producer hire the artist to perform, use their songs and sell the records under your own business name (such as an independent record label).
Finally, many producers might ask: “What is Harry Fox agency, and how will they going to help to secure permissions to record a song?” The correct answer is that, you have to double check that the music publisher of the song is affiliated with Harry Fox agency. If not, you cannot get any help from them.
Harry Fox agency represents music publishers in issuing mechanical license. You can read more about Harry Fox here: http://www.harryfox.com/songfile/faq.html
Even though as a record producer , you have to be good technically (dealing with sound and recording equipments); you also have to good in administering legal documents such as licenses because in the real world job, you have to deal with these.
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