Last week he came to me with the same question that crosses all our minds: How do I make money on my music? I started to list the ways, and as we’re talking, his stuff is playing in the background. I hear a vocal sample that’s wonderful, original, fresh, and compelling. “Where’d you get that?” I ask. “Oh,” he says “Zap Mama. Isn’t it sweet?” I say, “Well, you know, you’re going to have to clear that sample if you want to make money on it. You do know that, right?”
Billy was crushed. Like many artists just getting in to the business, he had no idea. “What should I do?” he asked.
For the answer, I turned to the Go-To- Guy in my sampling universe, Francis Preve. Not only is Fran a Keyboard colleague and the author of The Remixer’s Bible (which you should read if you ever want to use someone else’s work in your own), he’s huge in the remix world. “First of all,” says Fran, “the new law is that if you sample anything, you must pay.” Okay, so who do you pay? You can’t just go to the Wal-Mart and clear samples; you’ve got to find the owners. But how?
“Clearing houses are a good first stop,” he says. “They have relationships with publishers and record companies and they’ll be able to clear both the publishing and the mechanical royalties.” (See Clearing Houses sidebar.) This is starting to sound complicated. All Billy wants to do is use a five-second soundbite of a Zap Mama vocal.
Francis continues: “There are two things you’re licensing. There’s the composition — the creative work — and that’s controlled by the publisher. Then there’s the actual recording done by the artist — and that’s controlled both by the artist and the artist’s record company.”
Gulp. We’re talking thousands of dollars here in licensing fees. Billy’s fast-food gig won’t touch that. Francis offers some hope: “You could do a cover. Just re-create the performance in your own studio and then pay the publishing on it. Anybody has the right to do a cover of any song and you’re free to reinterpret it as you see fit.”
Just for the hell of it, Billy and I called Luaka Bop, Zap Mama’s record company, and asked them what it would take to license the sample from the song “Citizen 120.” Yale Evelev of Luaka Bop filled us in: “We’re not a big bureaucratic record company, so you’d give me the details, I’d pass them along to [Zap Mama founder and singer] Marie Daulne, and we’d discuss the situation. Sometimes she’s busy recording herself or on tour and might take a while getting back.” Right away we can tell that this is a human being. We’d probably have a more challenging adventure with, say, Sony/BMG. Yale continues: “For a majorlabel artist like Lupe Fiasco, who just requested a license for a Zap Mama sample, we might charge a $10,000 advance and a royalty percentage. For that very special unsigned artist who’s doing 12" vinyl, we might put the record out ourselves. But this has only happened twice in our history.”
Naturally, record companies need to protect their artists’ work, and they’ll go after sample pirates with their legal artillery blazing. But in the real world, these companies have bigger fish to fry than Billy Mosgrove. (Though now that we’ve alerted them, Billy’s life will be ruined.) Here’s the word: Don’t stifle yourself. Sample. Do it. But be aware that if your music does make it out of your bedroom, you must share the rewards. In fact, there’s some incentive here to make highly original music that other people will pay to use. And since Billy and I are both composers, it sounds fair to us.
Free Samples
There are organizations that connect people who want to use free music samples with composers who want their music to be used for free. Go to creative commons.org/wired and you’ll discover a whole album by artists like Beastie Boys, David Byrne, and (can you believe it?) Zap Mama that offers original music that you can rip, mash and share to your heart’s delight.
Sample Clearing Houses
If you’re dealing with a sample from a big artist, you can follow Rich and Billy’s example, contact the record label directly, and speak with someone who handles licensing; if the label doesn’t own the artist’s publishing, it should be able to refer you to the folks who do. If, however, you want to find a clearing house that will do the work for you, here are a just a few you can contact:
www.calcmasters.com
www.dmgclearances.com
www.sampleclearance.com