“After that very expensive lesson, I never wanted another artist or producer to feel that way,” — Interview with Music Lawyer

On our YouTube channel, we share insightful conversations with experts from the music and video production industries. One of our recent convos was with Ryan Schmidt, a singer-songwriter who is now a music lawyer with a mission to advocate for fellow artists and help them navigate the complex path of the legal side of the industry. 

We’re attaching the full conversation with Ryan here and sharing part of it with you in this article. 

“If music was gone for me tomorrow, I'd be a music lawyer and advocate for my fellow artists.”

I am an artist turned music lawyer; that's how I brand myself. It all started in Boston where I grew up: I was an acoustic singer-songwriter and I wanted to be the next John Mayer. My parents said that I had to go to college, so I couldn’t just graduate from high school, hit the road and go ahead and do that. Even though I probably recorded my first album when I was 16 or 17, so I was in the studio early.  

But I went to undergrad in Boston. I studied music business, and I really fell in love with the business side of how everything works here. I was fascinated by the contracts and copyrights because how many horror stories do we have about it? So this is really fascinating and there are a lot of rules here. There are a lot of traps to look out for. During my senior year of college, the producers of the TV show The Voice reached out to me as they wanted me to be on season three. 

They flew me out to LA and I did my audition. They're trying to build a whole story around me and they said, "Ryan, if music was gone for you tomorrow, if you didn't have music in your life, what would you do and why?" And I said, "I am fascinated in the legal side of the music business. I'd want to stay in music, but if music was gone for me tomorrow, I'd be a music lawyer and advocate for my fellow artists." And they said, "That's it. That's your story. You're the music law kid." 

At that point, it was just something that came off the dome. But I realized that was a real passion of mine years later. There was a reason why that was the first thing that came to my mind. And a few years later, I'm in Nashville, I'm doing the songwriting thing and I just signed a record deal that I thought was going to be game-changing. This was going to take me to new heights. And since I went to music business undergrad, I thought I knew everything. So, I was presented with this record deal. I didn't have a lawyer look at it. And the record company told me it was a 15% record deal, which 10-12 years ago was pretty normal; it was a pretty good royalty rate for a new artist. I was, "All right, this is not going to be so bad." I got my first royalty statement and my music was licensed everywhere.

That year, I made about a million dollars in licensing fees but my royalty statement was $40.

I went back and I read their fine print to figure out how this was even possible. So that 15% was closer to 0.00004%. That was a very expensive lesson. Once I had that experience, I never wanted another artist or producer to feel that way.  

What are the most common mistakes you see that new artists make? 

I think it’s not having any type of paperwork involved with their collaborators, whether it's their producers, their co-writers, somebody that just came in and who they paid $50 to play some backing guitars—that all seems pretty easy and harmless. And it usually isn't a big deal unless that song starts doing really well. Then people start saying, “I never signed a work-for-hire agreement. I'm a co-owner of that song. Give me publishing." And then it becomes really messy where it could have been something like, "Hey man, 50 bucks. You play a guitar solo on this song. Does that work for you? Here's a piece of paper. Can you sign it?" “Yeah, no problem.” That would have been super easy at that moment, but it can be really costly on the back end. 

One demographic that seems particularly capable of scanning people is the older music industry folks who have been in the game for a while and they might have plaques on their wall from the 90s. Those are the people who have enough information to be dangerous in this game, but also sell you on the dream. And those two combinations can sometimes be a bad situation. I see a ton of those types of folks serve as manager consultants where they're, "Hey, you know, just pay me five grand a month and I'm gonna open every door in town for you."  

Do artists need to copyright every song or every beat that they make? 

From the US copyright perspective, you technically have copyright protection the second you create that work and put it in any tangible form. So, the second I open my phone and record a voice memo or write it down on a piece of paper, I automatically have that protection once I've put it in a fixed form. 

In the US, you get additional protections and remedies if you take an additional step to federally register it with the US copyright office. In America, you get the right to sue. You can't even go into court to sue for copyright infringement unless you've done that federal registration. But you also get a few extra things like the right to get statutory damages instead of just actual damages. Instead of having to prove that someone stole your song and damaged you an X amount, you get to pick a range of damages and that can really help. You also get the presumption of ownership and a right to collect your attorney's fees if you win. 

You already have the ownership, but these are additional protections. And as far as when it is appropriate, if you are a producer that is producing beats en masse, it doesn't really make sense, in my opinion, to register every single beat that you have out there because if you might have a thousand beats, that's going to cost a lot of money to register.

Under the US copyright act, you can have albums and register up to 20 songs per album, which we did for one $65 filing fee. So you can either file a single song for $65, or you can file 20 songs that's in an album for $65. What we had to do with producer albums is we actually had to release those as instrumentals. And then we released it on the DSPs as instrumentals and we registered them. Some of those actually did pretty well on TikTok sounds. So, there are a lot of benefits to just putting your instrumental beats out there, making a claim to your YouTube content ID and owning all of that from the get-go before you start putting it on the beat stores. 

As a music lawyer, what would you say about using samples in beats? Who's responsible for clearing the sample?

It really just depends on what that contract says. Oftentimes, on beat stores, it'll say the artist is responsible for clearing a sample. But if you go and do a producer agreement for a placement for a major label, it is often going to say the producer represents and warrants that they own the copyright or they've cleared everything in this song. So it really just depends on the contract. Now, when you have a sample, there are two sides of two different copyrights that are created in a song. There's the master and then there's the composition.

The sound recording, aka the master (what you can hear), and the composition, aka the publishing (what you would see on, like, sheet music and lyrics). So when you have a sample or you get a sync placement or something like that, you need to get both sides of that cleared. Say it's a record that was released by Universal Music Group and it's published by Universal Music Publishing Group. You have to get the master side cleared by UMG and the publishing side cleared by UMPG. So two different licenses. 

That's a little bit different than an interpolation, which is really just you're going to perform that composition. You're going to make your own sample, essentially. You're going to take that melody, but you're not going to use that recording. So, then you only need to clear the publishing. 

The best practice is not to use something that you don't own. There have been plenty of times in history where people have had samples that they didn't have. It worked out great, the song did really well and everybody did well. There are other times where the sample wasn't cleared. The song did really well, and now they're asking for 100% of the publishing because of a three-chord guitar riff, which would’ve been avoidable if you had cleared it. There are people who say, "It's a lot of money, so why would I go ahead and do that unless I know the song is performing well." 

Well, copyright infringement is also a lot of money.

If someone is making a beat for fun & they're not signed to a label, how would they even go about clearing a sample? How to get in touch with UMG to clear a sample even for an instrumental release on Spotify?

There are a few ways to do it. One would be to look at the BMI, ASCAP, SOCAN, like repertoire search. Look up that song, and it should tell you who the publisher is. There will typically be a publishing contact, such as an email or a phone number right there in that registration. That'd be a good first place to start. 

Once you have that conversation, you even say, "Could you put me in touch with the label?" So, you could do the DIY route. They may or may not get back to you. If they do, they're going to want to hear the final mix and mastered song because they want to approve something that they know is the final version. They want to know that it's good because they don't want to say yes to something that isn't a good representation of their song. So, that's one thing. You go the DIY route or you can use a sample clearance company and the best one that I know of is DMG Сlearances. They're out in California and they clear everybody. They have a flat fee to do the work to get the clearances, but then whatever the publisher and label charge is extra the license fee. 

Also check out Tracklib if you've never heard of them. It's essentially like a subscription-based digital record bin and everything within that subscription is already pre-cleared. So, you don't have to go and get the clearances because that library is already good to go. And there are some good records. There are also some super obscure like old set jazz records, but you can find some super cool stuff in there.

What's your opinion on AI and music production as well as other areas of music?

I am neither strongly for or against AI in any space. I'm for ethical AI that's got the permission of the rightsholders, and if it's a tool that helps aid in human creativity. I use LALAL.AI to do stem splitting and I think you do a fantastic job. All these tools out there really push the boundaries of what humans are capable of making. I think that's really cool. What I don't love is just the off the shelf generative AI stuff. Mostly because they're built on a bunch of copyrighted material that they didn't get the rights to, and we're going to have to clear that up legally.

But also, I don't love that they are being marketed towards non-musicians as some fun thing. I think that the tools are really incredible and what they've been able to build, but I would like to see it a little bit more integrated with the music community and be a little bit more respectful.

Watch the whole interview on our YouTube channel 💛

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