Dear partners,
This time I wanna make some comments and give you a general heads up about some problems that could derail the music business if we don't get a handle on them. Some say we won't get this under control. I think we should try by an attitude change though!
Piracy has been with us since vinyl hit the scene, perhaps even before. It took off in the 1960s when Philips introduced the music cassettes and they became popular because of the ease of duplication. Then it had a new life when recordable CDs were introduced. Philips were involved again. The third wave began somewhere around 2012 when streaming took hold.
With AI things have got much cleverer and much harder to control. Fake artists, fake songs and fake albums, fake accounting links and diverted stream revenue, are some new problems facing us now.
Just Google it and you will see dozens of links.
In this NYT story (directly above) from September 2024 the "producer/artist" it is said could scoop up $1,2 million a year. Unscrupulous labels issue fake AI generated albums by known artists clocking up thousands of streams from fans before the band wakes up to it.
There are a couple of acts in our catalogue, amongst them Robin Auld, Mike Perry, Tony Cox, whose artist names are common to more than one act. Sometimes unavoidable, but when naming your act (band) take care that you protect your name if you can. The same goes for your label name. One of my labels, Mountain Records is common to at least three companies, all separately legitimately registered but in Japan, the UK and SA around the same time, before the days of the internet!
As distributors and publishers we are pretty careful but can't always control every recording passed to us. We look out on the main platforms for misuse like duplication of listings and false publishing metadata. When we see a rights scam we can pretty quickly set the wheels in motion to object, however we have had counter challenges that freeze our own listings.
As artists/producers you should look out for sampling and lyric/melody copying. Our partners have pretty sophisticated music ID software that can flag abuse. Ironically this has blocked us in the past because of unknown sampling and melody duplication. If you sample please declare this when sending new productions to us.
You should also be careful with your rights contracting to avoid territorial and period duplications. If you pass rights on to us and previous rights holders are still entitled to use your works, and we get "heavy" with a platform, we can be banned from platforms for false claims.
I always tell composers not to let their works out on the internet in any way before the work is published. Unfortunately it is not always good enough for a new composition, to just notify your local copyright society in your territory.
Best wishes for 2025. May the dark side know that we are watching.
Sincerely,
Patrick Lee-Thorp
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