Codes, Licenses, and Little Black Lines
Originally published at The Null Device Blog. You can comment here or there.
In the past week I’ve crash-coursed in the mechanics of putting out a CD with all the appropriate “stuff” attached.
It’s danged easy to put out a CD - got a CD burner and a few blanks and you’re set.
To put a CD out that you can sell widely? That’s trickier.
First off, there was licensing. “Recursions” contains a cover of Dead Can Dance’s “Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove.” Yeah, I’m a small enough artist that likely nobody is going to notice if I didn’t pay the mechanical royalties for the cover, but…well, hell, it’s easy, and if I liked the song enough to cover it, I should help support the artists who wrote it. And, there’s the additional issue that if on the off chance Brendan Perry does happen to come across the song, my arse is legally protected. It’s cheaper to pay the $50-some for the digital download license now than it would be to pay the lawsuit later. The fees vary - for downloads they require an estimate, and then charge .0105/download. You can renew easily if you go over that estimate. CDs are usually a flat fee of $35/500CDs. And this only applies to songs managed by the Harry Fox agency…which is most of them, actually. www.harryfox.com
Then, there was the UPC symbol. Amazon won’t sell a disc anymore unless it’s got a UPC symbol. A lot of aggregators, like TuneCore or CDBbay, or CD duplicators, or design bureaus all have the stuff to add a UPC. It’s often cheap or free through one of those services. I, of course, did it manually. I procured a UPC from someone I know who has a lot of them (I could’ve also bought one from one of the many UPC resellers online), then did some figuring and got some tools from Simply Barcodes and some advice from AccuGraphix et voila. A right pain in the ass, let me tell you, but now I can sell this stuff wherever I want without any hassle.
Finally, ISRC codes for the tracks. International Standards Recording Codes (ISRC) aren’t required, and they’re not a deal-breaker, but if you’ve got ISRC codes, things are easier to track and easier for some services to make sure your music isn’t duplicated, misattributed, etc. They’re also embedded in the Redbook Audio CD standard. So it doesn’t hurt to have ‘em. Now, to get them is another story - you gotta sign up at usisrc.org for a one-time $75 fee, which means you can assign up to 1000 ISRC codes a year for your own works. I toyed with the idea of becoming an ISRC manager, which would allow me to assign codes for clients’ works in addition to my own, but that cost more and I don’t think I’m going to want to pay a few hundred a year for a service I might use 4 times.
What’s left? I’ve got to register all the tracks with my rights management organization (in my case, ASCAP) so that club somewhere that actually pays artist royalties when they play tracks will send me my six cents.
I may be a small-time artist, but I go by the book.