At 8:49 PM +0200 7/03/02, Peter Castine wrote: > >Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 19:05:12 -0400 >>To: John Hughes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> >>When I was arranging for these kinds of revues, I worried about >>getting permission to arrange, which I knew from my university >>Business of Music class that I was supposed to obtain. I learned that >>in reality, even the case of HUGE recordings and MONSTER productions, >>permission to arrange is not even an issue, as the publishers want as >>many royalty-earning performances of the work as possible, in any >>arrangement at all, no matter how bad. They WILL, however, look >>askance on you publicly offering for sale competing versions of their >>commercial arrangements, as this takes money out of their pockets. > >The latter is a core issue if your sole stake in the project is >arranging. Unless the band or concert organizer is paying you up front to >arrange, the only way that you can generate income from your work is to >sell the arrangements. But most publishers are extremely uncooperative >about granting permission to make arrangements. > >THe "it takes money out of their pockets" argument is one I don't follow. >If they grant permission for you to publish, sell, and/or collect >performing/mechanical rights royalties for your arrangement while taking >a cut of the revenue, they would be generating income, wouldn't they?
Not as much as THEY get selling their own arrangement. They don't want to do anything that might even reduce their cut, such as a sub-publishing deal like you describe. I've run into this thinking time and time again. No thought for artistic merit, only bucks. One exception I heard about is the estate of Jerome Kern, who blocked an entire album of Maynard Ferguson's because he had included an arrangement of "Old Man River" that the family considered to be so utterly tasteless, that they were able to have the whole album run recalled on the premise that he hadn't asked for permission to arrange it. Almost nobody DOES ask permission, because I don't think permission has EVER been refused for a recording, but it was a "gotcha". >Leastaways that's what I thought, but experience has taught me that >publishers don't think like that. I'd be interested if someone could >explain how they do think. In the meantime, I'm now sticking to PD >material when writing arrangements. Excellent idea. Or, if you DO write arrangements of published works, don't sell them, just use them on your recordings, for which you don't usually even have to get permission, because publishers don't consider arrangements that only appear on recordings as competing with their library, and they DO generate performance royalties. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
