Song of the Day 9/30: Abba, “Money, Money, Money”
As El Som noted in today’s Open Thread, Jack White has joined the veritable seven-nation army of musicians who’ve demanded Trump’s campaign stop using their music for rallies and online videos. The songs and artists who don’t want to be associated with Trump would make a long and varied playlist. Some of the artists have voiced distaste for him personally, though few as bluntly as White. Others seem more intent on protecting their rights to the songs.
I considered making a playlist of all the tunes Trump has been told to stop using, but it would be a weird one – Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” next to the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” next to the Smiths’ “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want,” and so on.
At some point, though, isn’t it just easier to ask people for permission? Why can’t they just stick to the Trumper musical brigade – Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, Jason Aldean? And why aren’t they playing Kanye and the clutch of B-list hip-hoppers who’ve endorsed Trump at his rallies in Arizona and Montana? Heh. I crack myself up sometimes.
The latest protest was lodged by Abba, or more properly their record company, over the use of three songs. “Dancing Queen” seems an odd choice, but “Money, Money, Money” speaks directly to a guy like Trump, even if it sounds like it’s coming from the mouth of Melania.
The song was released as the follow-up single to “Dancing Queen,” an international No. 1 in 1976. While it nearly duplicated that success in the UK, where it reached No. 3, but stalled at No. 56 on the Hot 100.
Quite frankly, what is left unsaid in most of this perennial “don’t use my music” posturing is that, with a few exceptions, the artists either don’t actually control copyright in the music, or they have made it available for event licensing through ASCAP for a relatively reasonable fee.
So, if you take a song like “My Heart Will Go On”, it is in the ASCAP catalog as ISWC: T0702497139 (you can look them up here: https://www.ascap.com/repertory#/
If a song is in the ASCAP catalog, and the licensee has paid their event licensing fee in order to use it as background music, then the artists and whomever else can engage in whatever performative theatrics they like. But the reason you don’t see a lot of actual lawsuits arising from this is that the artists have no legal basis to complain if their music is in the ASCAP catalog, and the event sponsor has paid the annual fee to use anything in that catalog (which is a pretty low fee).
The notion that, when you go to some festival or other event and there is background music playing, that the event managers had to individually negotiate licenses with each of the recording artists (who, again, are not likely to be the copyright owners in the recording in the first place) is just silly. If it worked that way, nobody would be able to reasonably use background music at events. But, that is precisely the reason why, with a few exceptions, event music licensing does not work that way. The entire point of licensing organizations like ASCAP is that anyone entitled to royalties in a recording – which includes the composers, recording artists, and the people who engineered the recording itself – gets paid by the fact that the owner of rights in the recording makes it available in the ASCAP catalog and then receives a calculated share of the overall catalog license revenue, and pays out whatever contractual share is due to the writers, recording artists etc., if any.
The end result is that the recording artists receive residual checks on a regular basis and it is pretty clear from some of these “objections” that a lot of them have no idea where the money actually comes from.
Are there exceptions? Yes. There are certain copyright owners who have not made their works available through the ASCAP catalog, but they are few and far between. One notable exception, for example, is Eye of the Tiger by Survivor. Because it is such an attractive song for certain events, they actually make more money by extracting settlements from unauthorized users than they would by licensing it through ASCAP.
But most of this is just gum flapping that occurs every four years because people have no idea how music licensing actually works.
All true. My impression was that Abba was one of the exceptions, just from the quotes at the link. Artists are starting to negotiate clauses that exempt political uses, but those are still rare.
One element that isn’t mentioned: Has it been established that the Trump people paid the fee? Because it wouldn’t be the first bill they skipped out on.
From the artists’ standpoint, it doesn’t hurt to get yourself some free publicity. Unless you’re Tenacious D.
Yep. Publicity is the main thing. The fee is dirt cheap. On the order of hundreds of dollars.
And yet Trump might still have skipped out on it.
Back when he was just a New York nuisance, Spy magazine ran a prank where they sent rich people checks for decreasingly small amounts. From Mother Jones: