DIGITAL MEDIA DEALS IN THE SPOTLIGHT
WHY DO
BAD DEALS HAPPEN TO GOOD ARTISTS?
As Lennon and McCartney and Bruce Springsteen have found, those on the creative side of an artistic deal have a great deal to lose if a contract doesn’t look after their rights. Mark Fischer investigates the scene in today’s media landscape.
Reading about horrendous deals involving renowned artists in their early days, it is tempting to wonder whether those mistakes were just that. In other words, with the benefit of hindsight (or better management) the bad deals could have been avoided. Or perhaps, those ‘mistakes’, as awful as they look out of context, were almost necessary to get an entertainment career to the next level, because they might have led to propitious connections and great professional developments.
Hearing such tales, it is wise to focus on how such unfavourable contracts happen. Factors may include:
• Artists have little or no leverage in the early stages of their careers. Such mistakes could be the price of success (a kind of rite of passage) or just unnecessary, even stupid, slip-ups.
• Companies and people get bad advice, for a variety of reasons.
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• Te circumstances of an emerging career are complicated and may not be fully known or understood at a particular point in time.
• It isn’t possible to predict the future with certainty. Better opportunities just around the corner aren’t always visible.
• A changing digital media environment means that the received wisdom of how the media have worked for decades might no longer be true.
• It’s great to be lucky and not just talented.
Stories of lopsided deals abound in the entertainment business, going back to Bruce Springsteen accepting a pittance for royalties when he, as legend has it, signed a contract on the hood of a car in the parking lot of a bar. Tey go back further, to John Lennon and Paul McCartney handing over music publishing rights to their songs.
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In due course Springsteen and the two Beatles found themselves embroiled in long, bitter and, of course, costly legal battles to regain what they believed was rightfully theirs. While the deals they made are well-known—maybe infamous is a better word—they were hatched in much more stable times, long before Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, and a host of other digital outlets and devices.
With the media landscape shiſting so quickly and dramatically, how can both sides in an artistic deal hope to protect themselves? As Lennon and McCartney, along with Springsteen, have shown, those on the creative side have a great deal to lose. While there is no surefire way to ensure anyone gets a great deal, there are several things that can be done to put them on the path to a satisfying agreement.
Te challenge begins with something a simple as defining terms. Tere was a time when defining the word ‘television’ was simple. It was over-the-air broadcast with limited distribution and, therefore,
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