Employer of the month?

[slartabartfast]

"Discovery has informed many of its top composers that, beginning in 2020, they must give up all performance royalties paid for U.S. airings, and that they must sign away their ability to collect royalties on all past shows on its networks."

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/discovery-networks-composers-music-royalties-1203434924/

 

 

 

[craigb]

At first I thought the first image on that site was representative of what was left of the composers...

If I was making music for them, I'd tell them to go get stuffed.

[Notes_Norton]

Sounds like decomposing

[Byron Dickens]

Hey, Discovery! Compose this:?

[PhonoBrainer]

Well, here's a different view. This turn of events is just capitalists doing capitalism.

Discovery built up its own music library, so they could save money and not have to shell out for unique, individualized music for their shows?

It's a low blow to strip out the original, royalties required music, and replace it with stock library music.

Its also pretty much the "vertical integration" from Rockefeller 101.

The same capitalist system that required, for a while, that composers actually be paid. For a while. And then, apparently, shed like extra baggage jettisoned off a ship.

 

Will the Discovery-watching public, in their dwindling numbers, ever organize angry boycotts because the bumper theme they heard in Cash Cab is noticed as identical to the ending credits of Battlebots: Resurrection ?

 

for interesting reference, here's a link to all the show's the discovery channel is making. I gotta say, most of them look pretty awesome: https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows

 

And as show music goes, a lot of the stuff I've heard on these shows us quite good indeed! I know that these composers have been counting on the royalties, in some cases, for their retirement income. So this latest development sucks for sure. Too bad music is so contractually ephemeral.

[craigb]

I hear they just got a subscription to Band in a Box...  Coincidence?

[Terry Kelley]

Good thing I have no talent.

[slartabartfast]

2 hours ago, emeraldsoul said:

This turn of events is just capitalists doing capitalism.

Indeed. 

Depending on how the original contracts were worded, stripping out contracted work and replacing it with library music in order to avoid paying the royalties for the originals may not be as effective as the capitalists like. Any ambiguity could fall to how the contracting parties understood the meaning of the original contract. The composers clearly understood that they would get royalties in addition to the up front payment, and industry practice supports that interpretation. That understanding allowed Discovery to pay them less up front with the intent that further payment would be forthcoming. So by getting around that payment with this ploy Discovery may be violating that mutual understanding and hence violating the contract. Let lawyers be lawyers. 

More to the point, there is a massive amount of "amateur" composition sitting on licensing service servers written by people who would feel lucky to get a pittance for their otherwise useless stuff. If all the video producers decide to follow suit with new projects going forward, the livelihood of another small subset of musicians may be disappearing in favor of dredging the ocean of freelance speculative composing for the cheapest product to stack behind a film. Good news maybe for "music directors" and people with skills of matching pre-written music to existing video.