That pisses me off when people pass coment on our business affairs. Jazzman licenced black fairy 100% in fact i think we paid 3 different parties if i remember correctly, if someone wants to dig into this go ahead. If you did your homework properly before posting on here you would know this.
People need to make sure they are 100% sure before slandering companies that work fucking hard to do things the right way, that goes for souljazz too, things are not always black and white in the world of licencing, but souljazz, ace, stones throw, jazzman always do their best to find the right person and make sure they are paid. Sometimes someone will crop up saying it should have been them but that is the nature of the business. When this happens the person will not be ignored.
If you want to bitch at someone i suggest bitching about BBE and GOLDMINE, their labels were built on booting stuff with no intention of paying anyone.
pookeyblow never said anything negative about Soul Jazz. Others did. I don't get it. You should have recognized by now that there are some foreigners on this board. Our English is not perfect. I don't know what you people think.
What was so wrong about the subject title? There's a big question mark behind "Never pays artists on thier comps". And the thread itself? Aren't we allowed to ask questions anymore? How come people on this forum get away with offending others so often?
And blaming pookey for being born in 1990 is soooo unnecessary. You need to apologize!
pookeyblow never said anything negative about Soul Jazz. Others did. I don't get it. You should have recognized by now that there are some foreigners on this board. Our English is not perfect. I don't know what you people think.
What was so wrong about the subject title? There's a big question mark behind "Never pays artists on thier comps". And the thread itself? Aren't we allowed to ask questions anymore? How come people on this forum get away with offending others so often?
And blaming pookey for being born in 1990 is soooo unnecessary. You need to apologize!
Serious, dudes act like Soul Jazz pays their cell phone bills for them and hand out free food in their communities.
And that "being born in 1990" comment makes people sound like a thousand year old doo wop collector ranting about how there's no good music anymore and hasn't been for 50 years, complaining about those young kids and their hip hip music.
If anything, by scrutinizing a company like Soul Jazz, the facts came out. Soul Jazz are the good guys, BBE and Soul Mine are bad. That is what discussions are for, to get to the bottom of these things.
The overly aggressive "don't talk shit about my friend's company you young whipper snapper" approach is
The overly aggressive "don't talk shit about my friend's company you young whipper snapper" approach is
Agreed, but neither is Pookey's uninformed fingerpointing... share knowledge or shut up please.
did you read his post at all? when did he "fingerpoint" at someone? i think he was just asking a question or opening a thread about some news he read. what's the deal? there are many people on this board who never contributed anything worth mentioning... how come they get away with it, while others are being offended for posting new threads that are quite interesting. stop the hatred!
That pisses me off when people pass coment on our business affairs. Jazzman licenced black fairy 100% in fact i think we paid 3 different parties if i remember correctly, if someone wants to dig into this go ahead. If you did your homework properly before posting on here you would know this.
"I think we paid like three different parties."
You need to do your homework. You supposedly did this shit and you don't even know who you paid? When I pay people, I know exactly who I'm paying. I talked to Tony Llorens, who IS the rights holder on that recording, after the record came out and he's never even heard of Jazzman. The Japanese cats who've been contacting him know he's the rights holder, why don't you?
I actually tried to get the dude on the phone today to see if he got paid by you after the fact, but couldn't get him. Maybe you did eventually track him down. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Understand this: if you pay 0 people, or 500 people, it doesn't matter if you don't pay the right people. If you have paid the right people since I was looked into it, good work.
I never accused you of not licensing, I gave it as an example of a mistaken license. And, as far as that goes, it is still an example of that, even if you belatedly paid the right people. I know a significant amount about what went into the producing and recording of this project, so try me. Did you use the master tapes for that little 45? I'm guessing not, because I know where the fuck they are.
That pisses me off when people pass coment on our business affairs. Jazzman licenced black fairy 100% in fact i think we paid 3 different parties if i remember correctly, if someone wants to dig into this go ahead. If you did your homework properly before posting on here you would know this.
"I think we paid like three different parties."
You need to do your homework. You supposedly did this shit and you don't even know who you paid? When I pay people, I know exactly who I'm paying. I talked to Tony Llorens, who IS the rights holder on that recording, after the record came out and he's never even heard of Jazzman. The Japanese cats who've been contacting him know he's the rights holder, why don't you?
I actually tried to get the dude on the phone today to see if he got paid by you after the fact, but couldn't get him. Maybe you did eventually track him down. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Understand this: if you pay 0 people, or 500 people, it doesn't matter if you don't pay the right people. If you have paid the right people since I was looked into it, good work.
I never accused you of not licensing, I gave it as an example of a mistaken license. And, as far as that goes, it is still an example of that, even if you belatedly paid the right people. I know a significant amount about what went into the producing and recording of this project, so try me. Did you use the master tapes for that little 45? I'm guessing not, because I know where the fuck they are.
The reason i dont have the info is that im Fryer and Gerald licenced this. If you man wants to contact us (presuming gerald has not already spoken to him) then our email is on the site, you admit you dont know the facts, perhaps you should before you start flinging shit around. If it turns out the record was licenced in good faith from the wrong party (this does happen from time to time) its not hard to fix, your agressive attitude is not required for this to happen.
If we wanted to do bootlegs we could and we would be driving nice cars so can you stop being so agressive as we work hard at what we do.
If you look back on the posts, you'll understand that the aggressiveness began with your post. You got on here, accusing people of not doing their homework, of slinging shit.
In every post I made it clear I wasn't accusing Jazzman of being a bootlegger. In every one of your posts, you made it clear you haven't even read what I wrote, and simply jumped to conclusions on your own.
I admitted that I haven't followed up on this in awhile. This isn't the same as not knowing my facts. If the contact hasn't been made, I'll facilitate it. That could've been how you started your first post, instead of engendering the aggressiveness that now seems to have offended you.
update: spoke with some of the Soul Jazz people last night, and it turns out they licensed the Spyder D track from the correct people (those who own the actual rights). However, they were also aware of mr D's asshurt message and are now working things out with him.
Fryer, you and Rob need to chill out, we're all on the same raft.
It is very easy to pay the wrong people a licensing fee when there is a production schedule that needs to be adhered to. That is, after you spend three years on the phone looking for someone that may or may not exist, and you finally get somebody on the line that knows what the hell you are talking about, they become your point person. And in order for the project to actually see the light of day, you have to roll with this. Finding true licensees becomes a real pain when doing a larger compilation project where each track needs to be secured from a unique party. Anyone who has tried to do a 100% legitimate compilation with twenty-odd tracks of obscure local music will understand the monumental task this becomes.
Which brings up the one legal plan that no one has actually discussed: ESCROW. With escrow, you can proceed with your release schedule and secure funds for parties that have not been sourced at the time. If you are a considerate label, you will continue to try and locate the copyright owners well after the actual release of the project, and will do so until you find them. I believe there is some kind of legal loophole where the byline "to the best of our ability" becomes grounds for getting off scott-free in the case of a dodgy license, but I am not a lawyer and that sounds like the excuse an inconsiderate label would make to cover their ass.
Bottom-line is that finding some of these people is a very, very time-consuming (and often impossible) chore, and for the sake of seeing a reissue actually come out, certain shortcomings befall every licensor.
As noted, this is a very "knowledge dropped" thread (also a very "ass hurt" thread but that's another story).
I recently got a taste of all this first hand when it came to the licensing for my Soul Sides comp (by the way, I was happy to see that Soulstrut is helping sponsor the NY release party even though I had nothing to do with the arrangements).
Zealous Records ended up having to place two or three songs in escrow because it proved extremely difficult to track down the original rights holders - in the case of Jimmy Jones, even with Dante's help, we couldn't track the artist down and in the case of Deke Atkins (whose label the Jones 45 came out on), he unfortunately died five years back so that ended that trail of inquiry. However, Zealous made sure to set aside part of our earnings into escrow on the chance that whoever owns the rights to the song pops up out of the woodwork: we paid everyone else so we want to make sure we're doing the right thing here.
But just to echo the point that everyone has said: the whole rights/publishing game is a bitch and it's far, far, far more convoluted - and on first glance, unfair - than most would assume. It fucking sucks but a lot of artists signed away their rights on "their own" songs years ago and have no legal recourse to demand payment if someone wants to license a song they don't own anymore. The Shirley Bassey example is a perfect one: yeah, it's her voice on that Kanye song but legally, she has no control over how her voice is used (at least, that's my understanding).
I had heard random rumors about BBE - didn't realize it was that bad. Monty: if they ever pay you, holler back at us. In the meantime, I'm going to stop writing about any of their releases, regardless if it's a comp or not.
One last point/question: what is the ethical thing to be done here? Consider that, at the birth of hip-hop (as recorded music), a lot of artists were probably more than willing to sign away their rights on songs because it meant some change for their pockets and, in many cases, they had no idea that hip-hop would become as big as it has or that the interest in their songs would gain the life that it has. I agree: it sucks that old school artists don't get paid off their music the same way that even the youngest of today's artists do but did anyone really do anything "wrong" in this process? Are the artists ultimately responsible for selling their own music off and not having a long term vision? Or are the labels in the wrong for not doing more to protect the artists who've lined their coffers?
Keep in mind: with few exceptions, I don't trust that labels are remotely altruistic; they're businesses and capitalist logic dictates that they should get whatever they can get for as cheaply as they can get it. Therefore, it seems more encumbent on the artists to look after their own. I think of someone like Joe Bataan, for example, who used to be a minority owner of Salsoul Records - a label he started - but allowed the Cayre Brothers to buy him out, I'm sure for a decent chunk of change, but then watched as Salsoul went on to make millions in the 1970s once Bataan was no longer an owner. Joe doesn't blame Salsoul - ultimately, it was his decision to sell off his ownership stake. Still, it does seem kind of wack, you know?
just a point on escrow. Escrow is named after the untouchable account into which monies owed to an untraceable person can be placed. However this is no legal defence for putting out a track that you haven't traced the owner for. The monies you then place in escrow are only owed to this person because of an ilegal act that the record company has perpetrated. If the artist or rights owner then wants to sue you he will be entitled to damages and to make you withdraw the record if he doesn't want you to have it. Something that happened to BBE when they put out I'm A Good Woman on Sister Funk. Strangely I've never encountered a record company that claims to put things into Escrow that really holds an escrow account either. Oops that may have been several points on escrow, so I'll chill now.
Correct on all accounts, Dean. Yet the escrow account can be a civil way to set aside monies in the hopes that when you find the people you are looking for they will be happy with the same flat fee usually allotted to the other licensees attached to the project. In most of these "unknown party" searches we're talking about everyday individuals, not massive publishing conglomerates.
THIS POST IS ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS BECAUSE I WANT IT TO BE CLEAR1! I WOULD LIKE TO HUMBLY APOLOGIZE TO SOUL JAZZ RECORDS, AS I HAVE FOUND OUT THAT THEY ARE ONE OF THE RARE COMPANIES THAT DO FOLLOW THE PROPER PROCEDURE FOR LICENSING SONGS, AND IN NO WAY SHOULD BE LUMPED IN WITH THE MYRIAD OF COMPANIES OUT THERE THAT USUALLY DON'T DO THE RIGHT THING. LET ME REPEAT THIS: SOUL JAZZ RECORDS ARE PROPER AND JUST IN THEIR USAGE OF "BIG APPLE RAPPIN'", AND I AM VERY PROUD OF THEIR USE OF IT ON THIS COMPILATION ALBUM. AS MOST OF YOU ALL KNOW, THIS CUT HAS BEEN BOOTLEGED TO DEATH! SINCE THE PERSON(S) THAT DID LICENSE THIS SONG TO SOUL JAZZ NEGLECTED TO INFORM ME, THE CONCLUSION I DREW WAS NOT AN UNREASONABLE ONE. IF ANYONE HAS ANY CONTACT TO SOUL JAZZ, PLEASE ,MAKE THEM AWARE OF THIS POST, AS I WILL TRY TO REACH THEM WITH THIS MESSAGE DIRECTLY AS WELL. KUDOS TO SOUL JAZZ RECORDS. THEY ARE A CREDIT TO OLDSCHOOL HIP-HOP! ONE, Spyder D
I had heard random rumors about BBE - didn't realize it was that bad. Monty: if they ever pay you, holler back at us. In the meantime, I'm going to stop writing about any of their releases, regardless if it's a comp or not.
I'M HOLLERING BACK!
BBE just paid us our advance for use of "Say Brother" on Funk Spectrum III
I had heard random rumors about BBE - didn't realize it was that bad. Monty: if they ever pay you, holler back at us. In the meantime, I'm going to stop writing about any of their releases, regardless if it's a comp or not.
I'M HOLLERING BACK!
BBE just paid us our advance for use of "Say Brother" on Funk Spectrum III
heh..... yeah, that's what it's called. and that's all we're going to get. i agreed to that because, after all, it WAS the first Stark Reality reissue, and helped put us on the map.
Comments
That pisses me off when people pass coment on our business affairs. Jazzman licenced black fairy 100% in fact i think we paid 3 different parties if i remember correctly, if someone wants to dig into this go ahead. If you did your homework properly before posting on here you would know this.
People need to make sure they are 100% sure before slandering companies that work fucking hard to do things the right way, that goes for souljazz too, things are not always black and white in the world of licencing, but souljazz, ace, stones throw, jazzman always do their best to find the right person and make sure they are paid. Sometimes someone will crop up saying it should have been them but that is the nature of the business. When this happens the person will not be ignored.
If you want to bitch at someone i suggest bitching about BBE and GOLDMINE, their labels were built on booting stuff with no intention of paying anyone.
What was so wrong about the subject title? There's a big question mark behind "Never pays artists on thier comps". And the thread itself? Aren't we allowed to ask questions anymore? How come people on this forum get away with offending others so often?
And blaming pookey for being born in 1990 is soooo unnecessary. You need to apologize!
Soul Jazz over the years has probably licensed a thousand songs. How many people complained so far ?
Serious, dudes act like Soul Jazz pays their cell phone bills for them and hand out free food in their communities.
And that "being born in 1990" comment makes people sound like a thousand year old doo wop collector ranting about how there's no good music anymore and hasn't been for 50 years, complaining about those young kids and their hip hip music.
If anything, by scrutinizing a company like Soul Jazz, the facts came out. Soul Jazz are the good guys, BBE and Soul Mine are bad. That is what discussions are for, to get to the bottom of these things.
The overly aggressive "don't talk shit about my friend's company you young whipper snapper" approach is
SONIC
Agreed, but neither is Pookey's uninformed fingerpointing... share knowledge or shut up please.
did you read his post at all? when did he "fingerpoint" at someone? i think he was just asking a question or opening a thread about some news he read. what's the deal? there are many people on this board who never contributed anything worth mentioning... how come they get away with it, while others are being offended for posting new threads that are quite interesting. stop the hatred!
;mobrule;
"I think we paid like three different parties."
You need to do your homework. You supposedly did this shit and you don't even know who you paid? When I pay people, I know exactly who I'm paying. I talked to Tony Llorens, who IS the rights holder on that recording, after the record came out and he's never even heard of Jazzman. The Japanese cats who've been contacting him know he's the rights holder, why don't you?
I actually tried to get the dude on the phone today to see if he got paid by you after the fact, but couldn't get him. Maybe you did eventually track him down. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Understand this: if you pay 0 people, or 500 people, it doesn't matter if you don't pay the right people. If you have paid the right people since I was looked into it, good work.
I never accused you of not licensing, I gave it as an example of a mistaken license. And, as far as that goes, it is still an example of that, even if you belatedly paid the right people. I know a significant amount about what went into the producing and recording of this project, so try me. Did you use the master tapes for that little 45? I'm guessing not, because I know where the fuck they are.
K in Canada.
Rob in Chicago
The reason i dont have the info is that im Fryer and Gerald licenced this. If you man wants to contact us (presuming gerald has not already spoken to him) then our email is on the site, you admit you dont know the facts, perhaps you should before you start flinging shit around. If it turns out the record was licenced in good faith from the wrong party (this does happen from time to time) its not hard to fix, your agressive attitude is not required for this to happen.
If we wanted to do bootlegs we could and we would be driving nice cars so can you stop being so agressive as we work hard at what we do.
In every post I made it clear I wasn't accusing Jazzman of being a bootlegger. In every one of your posts, you made it clear you haven't even read what I wrote, and simply jumped to conclusions on your own.
I admitted that I haven't followed up on this in awhile. This isn't the same as not knowing my facts. If the contact hasn't been made, I'll facilitate it. That could've been how you started your first post, instead of engendering the aggressiveness that now seems to have offended you.
It is very easy to pay the wrong people a licensing fee when there is a production schedule that needs to be adhered to. That is, after you spend three years on the phone looking for someone that may or may not exist, and you finally get somebody on the line that knows what the hell you are talking about, they become your point person. And in order for the project to actually see the light of day, you have to roll with this. Finding true licensees becomes a real pain when doing a larger compilation project where each track needs to be secured from a unique party. Anyone who has tried to do a 100% legitimate compilation with twenty-odd tracks of obscure local music will understand the monumental task this becomes.
Which brings up the one legal plan that no one has actually discussed: ESCROW.
With escrow, you can proceed with your release schedule and secure funds for parties that have not been sourced at the time. If you are a considerate label, you will continue to try and locate the copyright owners well after the actual release of the project, and will do so until you find them. I believe there is some kind of legal loophole where the byline "to the best of our ability" becomes grounds for getting off scott-free in the case of a dodgy license, but I am not a lawyer and that sounds like the excuse an inconsiderate label would make to cover their ass.
Bottom-line is that finding some of these people is a very, very time-consuming (and often impossible) chore, and for the sake of seeing a reissue actually come out, certain shortcomings befall every licensor.
I recently got a taste of all this first hand when it came to the licensing for my Soul Sides comp (by the way, I was happy to see that Soulstrut is helping sponsor the NY release party even though I had nothing to do with the arrangements).
Zealous Records ended up having to place two or three songs in escrow because it proved extremely difficult to track down the original rights holders - in the case of Jimmy Jones, even with Dante's help, we couldn't track the artist down and in the case of Deke Atkins (whose label the Jones 45 came out on), he unfortunately died five years back so that ended that trail of inquiry. However, Zealous made sure to set aside part of our earnings into escrow on the chance that whoever owns the rights to the song pops up out of the woodwork: we paid everyone else so we want to make sure we're doing the right thing here.
But just to echo the point that everyone has said: the whole rights/publishing game is a bitch and it's far, far, far more convoluted - and on first glance, unfair - than most would assume. It fucking sucks but a lot of artists signed away their rights on "their own" songs years ago and have no legal recourse to demand payment if someone wants to license a song they don't own anymore. The Shirley Bassey example is a perfect one: yeah, it's her voice on that Kanye song but legally, she has no control over how her voice is used (at least, that's my understanding).
I had heard random rumors about BBE - didn't realize it was that bad. Monty: if they ever pay you, holler back at us. In the meantime, I'm going to stop writing about any of their releases, regardless if it's a comp or not.
One last point/question: what is the ethical thing to be done here? Consider that, at the birth of hip-hop (as recorded music), a lot of artists were probably more than willing to sign away their rights on songs because it meant some change for their pockets and, in many cases, they had no idea that hip-hop would become as big as it has or that the interest in their songs would gain the life that it has. I agree: it sucks that old school artists don't get paid off their music the same way that even the youngest of today's artists do but did anyone really do anything "wrong" in this process? Are the artists ultimately responsible for selling their own music off and not having a long term vision? Or are the labels in the wrong for not doing more to protect the artists who've lined their coffers?
Keep in mind: with few exceptions, I don't trust that labels are remotely altruistic; they're businesses and capitalist logic dictates that they should get whatever they can get for as cheaply as they can get it. Therefore, it seems more encumbent on the artists to look after their own. I think of someone like Joe Bataan, for example, who used to be a minority owner of Salsoul Records - a label he started - but allowed the Cayre Brothers to buy him out, I'm sure for a decent chunk of change, but then watched as Salsoul went on to make millions in the 1970s once Bataan was no longer an owner. Joe doesn't blame Salsoul - ultimately, it was his decision to sell off his ownership stake. Still, it does seem kind of wack, you know?
just a point on escrow. Escrow is named after the untouchable account into which monies owed to an untraceable person can be placed. However this is no legal defence for putting out a track that you haven't traced the owner for. The monies you then place in escrow are only owed to this person because of an ilegal act that the record company has perpetrated. If the artist or rights owner then wants to sue you he will be entitled to damages and to make you withdraw the record if he doesn't want you to have it. Something that happened to BBE when they put out I'm A Good Woman on Sister Funk.
Strangely I've never encountered a record company that claims to put things into Escrow that really holds an escrow account either.
Oops that may have been several points on escrow, so I'll chill now.
Dean
Correct on all accounts, Dean. Yet the escrow account can be a civil way to set aside monies in the hopes that when you find the people you are looking for they will be happy with the same flat fee usually allotted to the other licensees attached to the project. In most of these "unknown party" searches we're talking about everyday individuals, not massive publishing conglomerates.
source
I'M HOLLERING BACK!
BBE just paid us our advance for use of "Say Brother" on Funk Spectrum III
Wasn't that from, um, 2001?
"Advance"?
heh..... yeah, that's what it's called. and that's all we're going to get. i agreed to that because, after all, it WAS the first Stark Reality reissue, and helped put us on the map.