Signed Artists Don't Own Their Music
I was taking a little walk today and jamming to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs first album, and I began to think a little bit. I was reveling about how much I loved the record (Fever to Tell), and how I slightly envied the band because I wish I could rock as hard as them and write such awesome songs. One thought led to another, and it dawned on me that artists and bands who work under a record label don’t truly own their own music. They don’t…I mean, do they? It belongs to the record label. It’s kind of confusing me, because how could one say they OWN music? I mean, sure you can say that you own a cd or record, which is a mass-produced piece of plastic that contains the music data, but music is music. You don’t have to pay to sing a song or play a melody on your keyboard. How do you put a price on something you can only hear, and how can you say you own it when you didn’t create it? I guess fame in the music industry has a lot of downfalls. They’ll make you famous, promote you, and maybe even make you rich in some cases, but your music becomes a product rather than an art, and it no longer fully belongs to you. If my work ever becomes known, I will be fully responsible for distributing and marketing and stuff like that, Even though very few listen to my songs, and they’re mostly in a rough, lo-fi demo format, since I have no resources, I’m proud to say that they’re fully mine. I hope one day that record companies become obsolete, and artists can discover new ways to make it on their own. It works like this at a lot of places. In this world, it’s really hard to say you don’t work under somebody, meaning that your work belongs to them. When it comes to something I love as much as music, to me, it’s a sad story to create something great and then not have the rights to it.
