I (Jim) am back, and so are a few stories I posted earlier this year. First off, remember the speculation about iTunes going over to tiered pricing? It looks like NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer might be getting involved. Sure, that site misspells his name, but they link to a legitimate story with the magic word: subpoena. Will anyone go to jail? Can anyone stop the music industry from setting prices? Is there anyone who’s not at war with them right now?
Second, Beavis and Butt-head won’t be the last DVD release mangled by clearance issues. According to Wired News, the choice is either to pony up millions of dollars to clear everything in a music-heavy series like WKRP in Cincinati or replace the songs, like “Love and Marriage” in the opening of Married with Children. Some sort of bizarre money dance has to take place for every little snippet of music, where the artists (or management or whatever) tries to get the most money without charging so much the studios pull the song. When they actually do pay retail for the songs, season sets can cost as much as $70- a full set of Beavis & Butt-head could run god only knows how many hundreds of dollars. Which, come to think of it, is one reason the NYT left out when they mentioned more and more tv shows using indie music: Matt Pond PA is not going to charge The O.C. six figures. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the contract signed away all rights forever, or at least set a super-low price.
(Followups via Digg/Music)
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First!
seriously, in 2006 can we just stop it with the “i’m first!” posts? fuck, if you are the first one and feel the need to rejoice at the fact you are first, at least have something to bring to the table about the topic at hand.
anyways…
this sucks about the music rights for dvds for tv shows. i’ve been well aware, but damnit, i want my wonder years on dvd.
So is this why Six Feet Under always costs so damn much?
What, no male indie rock hottie of the year post???
5th! Bow down.
screw that shiz, i want my indie male hottie results.
Aww The Time To Make The Donuts Guy Died!
http://popdrain.com/?p=2
Seventh! Believe it.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GWNLBPLN
Arctic Monkeys leakin’ goodness. Bit ropey, but there ya go.
Ok, maybe eighth then.
10th?
Fuck Eliot Spitzer. Seriously. The day he leaves office will be a great day for this nation.
hottie results TK, I promise. maybe tonight.
The music clearance issue is why MTV can’t and won’t ever release The State on DVD.
on the more common than you think topic of copyrights and dvd releases, the complete muppet show first season is missing a lot of stuff because they couldn’t clear it. apparently jim nabors wasn’t returning phone calls.
the only thing with which I associate Jim Nabors was a NYT crossword where the topic was homonyms (title: Homo Names) and there was this clue: “People who live near a YMCA”. answer: Gym Neighbors. he was not happy.
Robin Leach was in there, too.
Matt Pond PA !
I could have sworn that the blanket license you have to sign when you submit a video to MTV would have made this moot; does anybody have a copy of MTV’s contract? I haven’t seen one in years (pre-DVD, certainly) and I can’t really remember exactly what it covered. It’d be interesting.
Do shows like The Real World and Road Rules have the same problems with their dvd releases?
I can understand the B&B thing, seeing that many artists and labels complained about the reactions to their videos, but on a show like The State where they weren’t making fun of the music, that shouldn’t have been a problem.
In other news, anyone hear about Gary Glitter paying the girls off?
don’t know about mtv produced shows, but certainly this is an issue that comes up a lot, particularly with tv shows in the mid-late ’90s that optioned music for the show without any foresight that the show might later be released on dvd. i think it happened with felicity and other WB shows… they used music for the tv episode, but never got the rights to use that music for the dvd release. what the WB folks did was to release the show on dvd, with the original music taken out and replaced by music they could in fact get the rights for (read: lesser known artists). not sure why you couldn’t do that for all tv shows. and i don’t know, but it seems unlikely to me that by releasing your music vid to mtv, mtv would then gain copyright interest in that music (to dispose of as they want). i just can’t see record companies agreeing to that (never mind the artists themselves), but i could be way off on that. i didn’t even know mtv still played videos!
It’s why the Freaks and Geeks DVD took so long and cost so much. But it was worth it . . . no thanks to you, greedy remaining members of the Grateful Dead.
I actually work in licensing for an independent label. Matt Pond PA probably got about 25,000 for the use of that song over the end credit at least. and you don’t sign away all your rights, usually. but now all contracts are for all media devised thereafter and not just tv and video.
yeah, no disrespect to Matt Pond PA, but Roger Daltrey doesn’t get out of bed for less than $100k…$25k is a bargain, right?