Normal for EX co. to own 100% of Masters???

[mojorising]

I have been looking at a couple of exclusive library deals. And both have said that they must own 100% of the masters. Is this common practice? These companies are German so when I ask questions there is a language barrier. Can someone explain what this really means? What can’t I then do with the music other than not license anything directly or through another library?

[Mark_Petrie]

Absolutely. Truly ‘Exclusive’ (not exclusive for a time period, or for just a segment of the entertainment business) would imply that they are going to own the copyright and masters. In the US it’s usually called a ‘work-for-hire’ where you assign all the ownership of the copyright and masters over to the company.

[Carles]

I’m quite new on this so please fix me if I’m wrong, but it seems that again semantics can be an issue here.
I think you should ask them back to clarify what exactly they meant.

Sometimes the deal is expressed as 100/100 and sometimes 50/50 but also you need to know what type or fee or royalties are being discussed as there are essentially two types of share.

If talking about how the -sync- fee is shared then I find that 100% should be the total, so they can get 50/50 or 60/40 or 100/0 or whatever (usually you can find that any upfront fee might exists in exchange of a lower percentage for your sync fee or even a full buyout meaning 0% for you).
When talking about back end royalties (-performance- royalties) then is not unusual to see 100/100 rather than 50/50 meaning they take 100% publishing share and you 100% writing share.

So the point is to find out what’s the deal regarding sync fees and what’s the deal regarding performance royalties.

Carles

[Mark_Petrie]

Hey Carles that is a different issue from MASTERS – you should still at the very least get your writer’s share of the performance royalties when you assign ownership of the masters rights to a publisher. There are some libraries (usually run by TV composers) that take a chunk of the writer’s share, but that’s another topic for discussion 🙂

The licensing side of things also has little to do with it – I have signed exclusive deals like this where I gave up all licensing (for a good upfront fee) and also exclusive deals where I got half the licensing.

The publisher is essentially just making sure it’s in writing that they own the original recording.

Lastly, I see this question come up a lot on MLR – ‘EXCLUSIVE’ generally means just that – you can’t do anything else with the music! Unless there’s some exception (like they explicitly state you can sell the tracks to the public, you get the music back after a certain amount of time, or you can use the music within your own projects), consider it SOLD to the client you signed the music over to – it is now their property.

[Carles]

Thanks Mark.
Indeed this business it’s a bit tricky because its own nature and to make everything more complicated every library policy can drastically differ from other, and opinions from composers may differ a lot too.

Additionally, gender can make a huge difference too but people do not mention what gender/s one is mostly proficient on when telling “this library works great for me”. Some people can recommend this or that library but if they are not strong in your gender it might works really bad for you.
As a quick example let’s say that you can publish non-trailer music with a well known trailer house. You still can make no money no matter the reputation of the library because nobody is using tracks from them other than trailer ones…

I always heard that RF and non-exclusives are not a good deal but just a last instance, that one should target only exclusives with some reputation, but on the other hand I find that signing with an exclusive (often in perpetuity) might be a bad deal unless it is a top library because if they are small and they do not sell much then you might have literally trashed your work, so you’ve got no reputation anyway and either no money.

So, for short/mid term profit expectations seems that non-exclusives might work better but it also seems that working with NE and specially RF can close the doors to decent exclusives as it seems that the big guys are not keen to work with composers who went that way…

At some point, one don’t know what to do, not even from where to start :S

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