Please Release Me
How to get the rights to your music back from a hostile record label
by Craig Havighurst
December 4, 2000
Even in this new era of digital do-it-yourselfers vying for attention with sample downloads from their home-produced albums, visions of a major label deal still entice almost every working band or singer-songwriter with a van and a dream.
But that vision is fading. Last May, singer Courtney Love made a now-famous speech (read it at Salon) to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference in New York, in which she blasted traditional record deals as "sharecropping." A key point of her argument was that records made for major labels belong to the labels forever. The company might let an album go out of print, release it with no marketing support, or never release it at all, and there is little the artist -- especially one on the hook for thousands of dollars of recoupable expenses -- can do about it.
It's not impossible, however, to reclaim control of your work. Several artists have taken on their old labels ... and won. Here's how they did it.
A Little Help from Your Fans
'I would have had to sell 600,000 copies of this album before I saw the first dollar.' -- Sara Hickman
Sara Hickman, a folk/pop singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas, had released two albums on Elektra before she got a phone call around 1992 that looked like a career-ender. It was her manager saying that then-Elektra President Bob Krasnow had not only not liked her newest record but had abruptly decided to drop her from the label.
"My first feeling was I was really ashamed, like I'd done this bad thing," she says. "There didn't seem to be a lot of options in the music world. You got on a major label and that was the coup. You feel like you've made it finally. So all I could think was how embarrassed I was going to be and how disappointed my fans were going to be."
Perhaps most devastating to Hickman was the fairly standard recording contract proviso that she couldn't re-record or even perform any of the songs from her new record for five years. In a state of shock, she called her mother to break the news, and her mother asked why Hickman couldn't just buy the record back. So Hickman made an emotional phone call to Elektra's lawyer, who said he was sympathetic but that the company was $300,000 in the hole for the cost of making the album, and there wasn't much he could do about that.
"I had done my first record here in Texas for like $5,000, and I always wondered why we had to spend so much money," Hickman remembers. But between producer's fees and the premium rates major labels pay recording and mastering studios, costs swell until artists are virtually beholden to the record companies, with no options for walking away. "I would have had to sell about 600,000 copies of this album before I saw the first dollar," Hickman says.
There's a reason why labels spend so much on the recording process, and according to Nashville music attorney Jeff Biederman -- who has represented both artists and labels -- it has more to do with politics than actual costs. "It's almost like buying insurance," he says. "If you spend a boatload and hire the number one producer, then nobody's head is going to roll" if the record doesn't succeed.
Yet somehow, Hickman's call to the lawyer made an impact. About a half hour later, her manager called back and said, "I don't know what you just did, but I talked to someone at Elektra, and they've dropped the price. They're willing to sell you your album for $100,000."
That made the buy-back more realistic, but still not easy. Hickman credits her mother again with the idea for how to make it happen. The title of the album was Necessary Angels, a theme she'd developed out of her belief that people really do step forward and help each other when called upon. Hickman put out the word among her fans and the industry that she needed help, and people who made donations to an album buy-back fund received a bracelet (fashioned after a real-life, six-year hostage vigil Hickman had supported) and an invitation to a hoped-for record release party.
A few twists and turns later, which included Hickman selling her house and a number of guitars, the singer was able to buy the record for less than $50,000. Although it came out on an Elektra subsidiary, Discovery, the ordeal was Hickman's cue to go independent. Since then she's made her own records and leased them to the independent Shanachie label in New York.
Next Page: Licensing Your Material; Stealth Sales....
Craig Havighurst writes about music and the music business for The Nashville Tennessean.
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