Mega pop artists will still need that mighty push and marketing effort for a new release that only traditional record companies can provide. For others, what we now call a record label could be replaced by a small company that funnels income and invoices from the various entities and keeps the accounts in order. A consortium of midlevel artists could make this model work. United Musicians, the company that Hausman founded, is one such example.
I would personally advise artists to hold on to their publishing rights (well, as much of them as they can). Publishing royalties are how you get paid if someone covers, samples, or licenses your song for a movie or commercial. This, for a songwriter, is your pension plan.
Increasingly, it's possible for artists to hold on to the copyrights for their recordings as well. This guarantees them another lucrative piece of the licensing pie and also gives them the right to exploit their work in mediums to be invented in the future — musical brain implants and the like.
No single model will work for everyone. There's room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that's fine. I like Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man." Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won't be forced to choose.
Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our head and the place in our heart that music takes us to? Can I get a round-trip ticket?
Really, isn't that what we want to buy, sell, trade, or download?
From ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE MUSIC BUSINESS by Donald S. Passman
The one thing that I always insist that artists do is read...read...read. It's important that you are familiar with (at least) the basic dynamics of the music business.
Never put all of your trust in your manager and/or agent. Take time to learn and understand the industry you are in. My favorite book is "All You Need to Know About the Music Business" by Donald S. Passman. To help you get started, I have included an excerpt from the book on Record Company Masters.
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Most of the master licenses are, not surprisingly, from record companies. The rest are individual owners of recordings, which we’ll deal with a little later. With record company masters, you’ll only be involved in the deals as a secondary player because the contracting parties are your record company and the film company, who make a deal with each other. The money is paid to your record company, who promptly pockets half and treats the balance as artist royalties under your deal.
If your record contract says they need your consent to license masters into films (see page 166), they’ll call up and ask you to okay the deal. If the record company doesn’t need your consent, they may not even call you, although most will as a courtesy. (By the way, even if you don’t have the right to consent in your record deal, if you wrote the song and control the publishing, you can block the deal—remember, the right to use the master is only the right to use the physical recording itself. The record company can’t give a film company the right to use the musical composition [they don’t have these rights], so the film company has to make a deal with both the record company and the publisher to get a full set of rights.
So, if you’re the publisher, you can control the deal through the side door even if you can’t do it through the front door. Because you may be asked to consent to these deals, and because you share in the income, you should know how they work.