In 1956, Buddy Holly traveled to Nashville to record several songs. One of the songs he recorded was "That'll Be The Day", but the producer assigned to his sessions (Owen Bradley) hated rock n' roll, and did a terrible job on the song. After that, Buddy traveled to New Mexico and re-recorded "That'll Be The Day" (the version that became the monster hit) at a different studio with his own (superior) arrangement, but according to his contract with Decca, he couldn't release it, because Decca owned all rights to his music. He decided to call Decca, to try reason with them, and he secretly taped his conversation. They refused to give him the rights to his own song, but he went ahead and violated his contract. Here is the conversation he secretly taped.
Listening to Holly pleading with the masters he has alienated his rights to is heartbreaking. Decca had dropped him, apparently, but had the rights to sit on his recordings for 5 years. Although they had no intention of releasing the songs, they also would not give Holly permission to do so--the cigar-chomping executive kept saying "well, we got a lot of money tied up in them, Buddy!" But Holly offered to reimburse those costs; no dice.
Authors: do not let this happen to you. When you publish a book, consider publishing it yourself on Amazon/Kindle (or, soon, iBooks/iPad) or LuLu. Or persuade the publisher to let you post an online version for free. At least make sure the publisher will offer a kindle and ebook version. Negotiate, at the very least, the right to post the work online for free after, say, 3 or 4 years, when sales have petered out.
And what would happen if music was without copyright, how would musicians make any money?:
Billboard released its list of top money making acts. It doesn't give a systematic breakdown of earnings by category - but it did for Metallica (you know Lars Ulrich, the gas station attendant turned drummer who says he'd never have made the switch without copyright forever)
Along with touring revenue -- the band pulled in $22.8 million from 55 arena shows reported to Boxscore that drew more than 968,000 fans -- Metallica sold 694,000 albums in 2009. The majority of those sales came from its Rick Rubin-produced 2008 release, "Death Magnetic" (297,000). Album sales revenue totaled $1.6 million. And most of Metallica's track download earnings came from its 1991 hit "Enter Sandman," which sold 450,000.
Hmmm...think it would make a lot of difference to the world if they lost the $1.6 million from the albums? Without copyright they'd only make $22.8 million from touring...You might almost think it would be worth it to them to give the recorded music away for free to promote their concerts...-Music without copyright
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