Credit on an instrumental derivative?

[jonathanm]

Nov 22, 2009, 11:03am, hummingbird wrote:Nov 22, 2009, 10:46am, cardell wrote:This is a good question Chris! I have wondered the same thing.I am mainly a vocalist. I often write a melody/lyric to other peoples instrumental beds. Now, if I take my melody/lyric (that was inspired by someone else's work) and completely change/re-write/recorded the underlying music bed, would the work now be solely mine?StuartNo. One song, one copyright. It could argued you never would have come up with your melody without the inspiration of their bedtrack. Once you put the two together, it's one song. If I was writing with you (no matter which 'part' of the song you supplied), this would be written into the co-writing agreement. Otherwise, why co-write? Do it all yourself.Hmmm. I wonder about this. I have an instrumental piece, written on my own. Others, though, have liked it and put words to it. I still have the original instrumental under my copyright, though.Many folks have put words to Beethoven's Ninth (including hymn writers). Folks have even taken lyrics from other works and put them to new music (several hymn examples are available).I wonder what happens legally when this happens today, assuming you have willing collaboration by the composer or lyricist. For instance, if I wanted to write new lyrics to O Sole Mio, I wouldn't necessarily have to have permission from lyricists Aaron Schroeder and Wally Gold, who wrote "It's Now or Never".As long as the copyright registration clearly delineated composer from lyricist, would we be able to take our part and work with another partner? Hmmmm. Interesting.

[hummingbird]

Each to his own. I personally would not write lyrics for someone else's instrumental or bedtrack unless the entire song then became something we both owned. Otherwise the same bedtrack could have melody and lyrics written by any number of people. To me - especially in the realm of film/tv - that muddies the waters too much. Who then, owns the master? If I don't own a part of that master, there isn't much point in me co-writing with someone else. And can you really claim to own a bedtrack that other people have written with? If I write a melody for the bedtrack and we sign a co-write for that, and then you place the bedtrack independently in a music library, and we also sign the bedtrack & melody to another music library... I could see that being a legal issue, for sure. If you are writing songs to pitch to artists perhaps it's a different thing.

[jonathanm]

Yeah, definitely some muddy waters there.

[cardell]

Some very good points here.Stuart

[clonsberry]

Nov 19, 2009, 6:35am, jmeraz wrote:Actually, it's Harrison's. Again, if no money is involved, it's just pride. You can either work it out, keep silent, or part ways.If money's involved, it pays to work it out...and register it.Ugh. Somewhere deep down inside, I knew that. I just wasn't in a position to check and I figured my point would still be valid.Sorry, George.

[matto]

Chris, FWIW no well-adjusted professional songwriter or composer would claim to be the sole writer of something that is clearly based on, and owes its existence to, something their co-writer brought into the session.By professional standards you are right and he is wrong, but whether that makes it worth starting a fight over is a whole different question.

[clonsberry]

Nov 24, 2009, 10:52am, matto wrote:Chris, FWIW no well-adjusted professional songwriter or composer would claim to be the sole writer of something that is clearly based on, and owes its existence to, something their co-writer brought into the session.By professional standards you are right and he is wrong, but whether that makes it worth starting a fight over is a whole different question.I'm not much for confrontation. But it helps to know what's right and wrong. Makes me feel better .. and.. now I'm a little more educated and that's never a bad thing. Like I said, I guess I'm just going to let it go and move on to bigger better things. I've got 3 different albums I'm working on now (one of which is with "Bob") and someone just approached me about a 4th. Perhaps the most important thing was that I learned whether or not I had a right to expect what I expected.. and what was the "norm".As far as being well-adjusted??.. well, I can't speak for him but I never claimed to be - chris