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This page: Licensing Your Material; Stealth Sales
'Artist development almost doesn't exist. If your first album doesn't sell 250,000 copies, you're history.' -- James Talley
James Talley is a critically acclaimed folk artist whose records for Capitol in the 1970s had suffered from weak marketing and which have long been out of print. (Click here for an excerpt from his 1999 release, Woody Guthrie and Songs of My Oklahoma Home.) Talley had been frustrated with his time on Capitol, but his trouble really began in 1977. That's when he asked for -- and received -- a release from his multi-disc deal in order to seek a better contract, with promises of help from a manager who subsequently abandoned him with no explanation. Not only were Talley's recordings locked in a vault somewhere, Capitol deleted the releases from its catalog, so that only those with a long memory would even know they existed.
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In 1990, Rolling Stone named Talley's first album an "essential" recording of the 1970s, and Talley thought he might get his records re-issued on the strength of that endorsement. That's when he discovered another factor of the modern recording industry that made his plight all the more difficult. "Several times a release was scheduled," he writes in the liner notes to his newest self-released record. "But each time it was about to happen, there would be some big shakeup in the company, the personnel would all change, and everything would go back to square one."
Eventually, Talley found some allies in the company who helped him decide that it would be better to license the recordings and release them himself on a private label. Talley may have a new lease on a career, but he feels deeply burned by his entire experience with major labels and urges younger musicians to regard big record deals with great caution.
"You think, 'If I could just get a record contract, I'd be set for life.' Then when you get a record contract, you realize you're not set for anything. You're just at another beginning," Talley tells Harmony Central. He believes that artists need to learn the rules of the music business more thoroughly than in the days when a contract meant a long-term relationship. "Today, the concept of artist development almost doesn't exist in the music business. You get about one shot. If your first album doesn't sell 250,000 copies, you're history."
Stealth Sales
'This is my best work. I need my music to be out there, or I'm sunk.' -- Tim Carroll
One of the worst scenarios for an emerging artist -- and one that's increasingly familiar -- is when their label falls victim to industry consolidation around the time of a release. One example: Nashville roots rocker Tim Carroll, who recorded what would have been his major label debut on Sire Records during 1998. But a management upheaval after a consolidation with London Records led to a repositioning of the label's roster away from the Americana sound it had been pursuing and to numerous delays for Carroll's release, and for many of his label-mates as well.
"It just went on and on," Carroll says. "Some artists asked to be off the label. I just kept my fingers crossed." Then early this year, his patience ran out, and he got label chief Seymour Stein to concede that the record wouldn't be released. Carroll managed to get out of his Sire contract, but the record remained with the label. So, pursuing an option that may not be endorsed by many music attorneys, Carroll made duplicates of his reference CDs, created his own art, and started selling the album at shows. "This is my best work. I need my music to be out there, or I'm just sunk."
Carroll has even made his self-released version available through some mail order distributors, and he believes that his friendly relationship with Stein will keep the label from taking copyright action against him.
It's important to remember that despite Carroll's apparent success, the courts haven't yet tested the legality of a limited self-release of an album that hasn't been sold by a major label. An argument might be made that the label has breached its contract by not doing anything with the record, and that an artist's venue sales could be justified as a kind of market research for attracting the interest of another label. But the jury, for now, is still out on this one.
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