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Mike Matessino: "At least 5" new Williams releases due this year


Jay

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22 minutes ago, Brando said:

I was told this was changed, am I mistaken?

 

Here is exactly what Mike said about this:

 

For AFM recordings made before July 3, 2005, NO reuse needs to be paid to the musicians at all, provided a) that it’s for a physical format release with a 5000 unit maximum, and b) that the musicians list is published, preferably in the packaging. For recordings made after that date, whatever the musicians were paid to record the score for the film has to be paid to them again, 100%. That’s why it’s called “reuse”. They were paid to play music for sync purposes, but an album is a new use.

 

So, hypothetically, if 120 people were paid $360,000 to record the music for the film (musicians, orchestrators, copyists, at an average of $3K a person), then a label would have to pay that exact same amount to AFM in order to put out an expanded album. That makes it impossible to consider even before you get to licensing, publishing, production and manufacturing.

 

The 2005 date was established in 2015 and applied to recordings going back 10 years prior, but unfortunately it was not a “sliding” date as it really should have been.

 

Mike

 

I have never seen anything anywhere that indicated that the AFM has changed this policy.

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2 hours ago, Brando said:

I was told this was changed, am I mistaken?

 

I don’t believe there’s been any blanket change, but clearly, exceptions are negotiated, or the expansions of the Giacchino Star Trek and Rogue One scores wouldn’t have been possible. I mean there’s just no way a digital-only release of Rogue One is pulling in the kind of money to make it worth paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in reuse fees.

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15 minutes ago, Clockwork Angel said:

Didn't Varese cut choir on their DE of the first Trek score to avoid fees?


Well, I can’t recall in choir in the scores of Memoirs of a Geisha, The Adventures of Tintin, War Horse, Lincoln, or The BFG… 🤔

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Quote

For AFM recordings made before July 3, 2005, NO reuse needs to be paid to the musicians at all, provided a) that it’s for a physical format release with a 5000 unit maximum, and b) that the musicians list is published, preferably in the packaging. For recordings made after that date, whatever the musicians were paid to record the score for the film has to be paid to them again, 100%

 

The worst part is that these 'rules' don't even make sense beyond surface level.

 

I kind of get that by limiting to limited physical units, they're limiting the profit a label can make, and therefore avoiding them profiting excessively without paying them.

 

But, a musicians' list in the packaging? Sorry to be blunt, but why should a player give a shit if their name is in a booklet that 2000 people in the world will buy? Hoping one of those purchasers will be desperately looking for a kick-ass brass player to hire and will find their guy via a soundtrack booklet? That's just silly, and worst of all, it tells me that whoever negoiated this has got their priorities totally messed up.

 

The repayment of the fee also makes no sense in the context of the first use being a film that will potentially bring in hundreds millions of dollars, and a reuse being an album requiring no extra work on their part, and will bring in a tiny fraction of that, at massive risk to the label.

 

I wonder if any AGM member/person has actually run the numbers on lower fees (I didn't say 'no' fees... just 'affordable' ones) to see how much they'd make in contrast against currently nonexistent releases.

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What about an expanded BFG... to include cues only in the FYC?  If that happened, I wouldn't be surprised to see tons of the FYC discs to hit eBay. (and with the wording RARE, and HTF!!.. lol).

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1 hour ago, Clockwork Angel said:

Didn't Varese cut choir on their DE of the first Trek score to avoid fees?

 

Much more obscure score, but John Debney's Zathura (released late 2005) had most of the choir cut on the OST as well, also Varese.

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This won't apply to JW, but for other composers that use virtual instruments..it shouldn't be any issue (unless we're paying a computer's sequencer (or random rack gear) to 'replay' the music.

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When Varese did Djawadi's Prison Break they removed the vocal from the beginning of the main titles on both releases. Can't be for any reason other than not wanting to pay royalties to the soloist, and it really sucked.

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So after Amistad announcement today, is the list complete for the year? Is it reasonable to expect anything more before the end of the year? If I am not wrong this is the third expansion since the opening of this topic (with Spacecamp and Presumed Innocent the first two), so not sure what to believe 🤔

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1 hour ago, ciarlese said:

So after Amistad announcement today, is the list complete for the year? Is it reasonable to expect anything more before the end of the year? If I am not wrong this is the third expansion since the opening of this topic (with Spacecamp and Presumed Innocent the first two), so not sure what to believe 🤔

I think so. In the last podcast with Mike Matessino he said, that there is one more relase coming this year, which now obviously is Amistad. Some others are more or less ready but still waiting for approval and will come next year. 

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7 minutes ago, ciarlese said:

The guys who built the lift in the building I live in, or the office I work in, don't get paid again every time someone "reuses" those lifts.

Well, even though I hate this situation, here I don't think this is right, a recording being copypasted somewhere means they lost the potential work of recording it again.

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8 minutes ago, ciarlese said:

 

There are quite a few things I don't agree with here, and not because I am a soundtrack collector. 

I agree being a musician is work, and possibly one of the most noble one. But they get paid to play music. I work too, and I get paid once for the work I do.

The guys who built the lift in the building I live in, or the office I work in, don't get paid again every time someone "reuses" those lifts.

It's also difficult to understand what they need to be "protected" from, and if this "protection" is working at all as the only consequence seems to be that those recording are left untouched somewhere while they could be restored, preserved and beautifully presented like MM is doing when he has the opportunity. That seems more "protection" to me.

And I don't agree on the "without these those film scores wouldn't exist", as the history clearly shows the opposite, and the musicians have always been highly valued before these fees were introduced.

The elevator comparison doesn't work. You are paid for almost every working hour. The musician gets only paid for the performance and not for all the hours of rehearsing and preparation which is depending on experience 70 to 80% of the time. If you would get paid only 20 percent of your worktime, you would be happy for some more financial appreciation of what you did, I guess.

It is in the end what Jay said in his last post.

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3 hours ago, TownerFan said:

 

especially because a lot of this music is constantly reused and repurposed in many forms.

 

You can still have a price structure which reflects the intended use of the music.

 

When I licence stock tracks for some personal projects I pay a much lower rate than a film studio licensing a track because they are expecting a substantial return from the artist's work whereas I'm not. The publishers charge according to how much you plan to personally profit from its usage. YouTube monetisers pay more, for example.

 

Hence why should a label wanting to release the music pay the same amount as the studio did to record it?

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3 hours ago, Richard Penna said:

A fee of some sort makes sense, yes, but why insist on a full repayment for a reuse where the returns (and therefore poential exploitation) are a fraction of the original usage?

 

How do you define the returns for a specific use case - especially the original one? How much money does the music used in the film itself make?  Is it more or less than the income generated by an album release?

 

But of course, these niche soundtrack releases are a special case and not representative of what these rules were made for in general. What it certainly does is prevent studios from contracting an orchestra to record music for a single film, and agreeing on an adequate payment based on that and the amount of money that will generate for the studio, and then going on to use the same recordings for ten more films, 20 TV series, 30 video games, and a dozen amusement parks, without paying anything beyond the initial contract.

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6 hours ago, Holko said:

Well, even though I hate this situation, here I don't think this is right, a recording being copypasted somewhere means they lost the potential work of recording it again.

 

This doesn't make sense to me. Unless there was something lacking in the initial recording, "the potential work of recording" a piece again is basically negligible. There's no reason for such a re-recording to be made or for that "potential work" to exist.

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I don't think sight reading all day and being stuck in a windowless studio for your entire playing career is privileged or beautiful. Having to play every single note with perfect attack, phrasing, rhythm, articulation, dynamic and tone must be highly stressful. Plus there's never an audience. It's just slog. All the time. Forever. Pretty thankless task to me. Yet they are the greatest musicians in the business because time is money and if you play one bum note your out. I've sang on plenty of  scores in London incl Star Wars prequels, Lord of the Rings you name it. The pressure is HIGH...

 

 

Thing is I never really got into Amistad. I have the old album but never listen to it. Something a bit too "Worthy" for me. But I could be completely wrong. Thing is there are so many other 2 and 3 CD sets of Williams scores that I'm still trying to get through...

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18 hours ago, Brundlefly said:

By the way, we're at 56 scores released in their complete form versus 18 scores that are left for special labels to expand.

Can you please clarify where you took these figures from? I have looked at the master sheet and what I find don't match 🧐

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