junebugz said:
YOUR NOT selling the BEAT over and over you are LICENSING the beat over and over again with a non exclusive LICENSE .........dugh!!!! That is what Big time Publishing company's do. They exploit their copyrights and collect income from doing it. That is SMART AS HELL.
Publishers get multiple income streams from one song and........that is SMART.
If you create the Character "Gambet" and a movie company wants to use your character in a movie you don't have to EXCLUSIVELY SELL the character, but LICENSE the character NON EXCLUSIVELY for use in the movie. You could allow other artist to make COMIC books with your character also NON EXCLUSIVELY. So you could get paid more ways using a Non Exclusive license........
This is done by professionals all the time.
You can sell a beat or song exclusively but it is CLEARLY not the only or best choice (concerning publishing income).
Tell me this….if you had a beat you knew was worth $50 would you sell it exclusively for $50 to one person only or non exclusively for $50 to 20 people ($1,000). Non exclusive is CLEARLY better (for most people) in that you have a made $1,000 instead of $50 and you can still license the beat to 20 other people and collect another $1,000 and so on.
You can do whatever the fu@k you want with your own music though. If you want to sell exclusively do it........but it is not the BEST or SMARTEST choice for everbody, even those who are full time in the business (such as myself).
No offense, but you are a bit confused regarding how these things work.
I will try to explain this to you.
Publishing companies: Yes they license the same song for multiple uses, but that does not relate to this situation. Publishing companies do not license original backing tracks for artists to put their own melodies and lyrics on. They license existing songs for use in films, TV, commercials and the like... they may also be involved in licensing samples for new works, but that is completely different for reasons that are both obvious and which have already beed discussed.
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The cartoon character example: This is not a proper analogy either. If you have created a cartoon character and you have created a following for that character and built up some equity and value in that character, then you have opportunities to license the image of that character. For example, you have a cartoon character like "Micky Mouse". That character is already successful. Because of the success of "Micky Mouse" people want to license the character for use on t-shirts, lunchboxes, watches, movies, etc, etc. People want to license it because they know people want "Micky Mouse" merchandise. The character is
always "Micky Mouse". The do not license "Micky mouse" for use in a movie as some other character.
Nobody is creating a random cartoon character and licensing it use as a bunch of random unrelated characters. You do not see the same visual cartoon character as a part of multiple cartoons as different characters. Let's use "Fred Flintstone" as an example (but pretend that "Fred Flintstone" was not a real cartoon character for this example.)
You do not have 10 unrelated cartoons with characters that look just like "Fred Flintstone" but are NOT "Fred Flintstone"... you will never see a cartoon and see a character who looks just like "Fred Flintstone" but it being a modern day superhero who fights crime in the big city.
"Fred Flintstone" is always "Fred Flintstone"
"Fred Flintstone" is not an actor who plays different characters...
"Fred Flintstone" IS the character.
Do you understand the difference?
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relating this to music: The stage at which you begin issuing multiple licenses is not as a generic piece of music for multiple to sing their own songs over. People start issuing multiple licenses when the song has become popular and has become valuable as a particular artists song. At that point, people license the song for use in movies, commercials, TV, etc. Those licenses are generally non-exclusive, or exclusive for a defined period of time or for particular uses. But the
artist generally is the only one using that backing track in their original piece of music. The artist has that music exclusively. The further licenses are based on that new song which used your backing track, and THAT is what people will be licensing. You, as the writer (or whatever you did on the track), will be paid accordingly if the song is licensed...