The master of the masters: Understanding music rights and ownership
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When you hear the words “master recording” or “masters” in the music industry, it’s referring to the original recording of a song or sound. Master rights differ from publishing rights and are handled completely separately, so it’s important to understand the difference. Publishing rights encompass lyrics and composition, whereas master rights refer only to the original recordings themselves. In today’s music world, owning master rights is equivalent to owning the rights to the recordings published on streaming platforms, but in the past, they referred to the audio sources released publicly on records, and then cassettes and CDs.
In traditional record deals, record labels pay for artists to record and produce their work and give the artist an advance in royalties. In return, the artist traditionally hands the rights to these recordings (masters) over to the record label, and the record label then profits from all royalties following the advance assigned to the artist. While these agreements sometimes have an expiration date, most are permanent, meaning that even after the music has made back the cost of production and release the artist still does not receive any compensation for their work, no matter how much profit it is making or for how long. In these scenarios, the copyright of the recordings belongs to the record label, as a sort of payment for the risk they have taken in paying the cost of recording and promotion.
When an artist doesn’t own their masters, it means more than giving up revenue—in signing such a contract, they have no control over how their masters are used. For example, if the record label wanted to accept a deal to use an artist’s master in a movie, T.V. show, or advertisement, the label would have full control over the decision and the artist would not have any say in where their masters were used or what they were representing. To make matters worse, if bad blood boils between the artist and their record label, it would be perfectly within the label’s rights to refuse to let the artist use their creative work in their own endeavors.
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In recent years, there has been a movement within the entertainment industry for artists to work toward gaining ownership of their masters. Usually, this would have to happen through a transaction: an artist buying back their masters. However, it is never required of a record label to agree to sell masters back to the artist, so sometimes it remains impossible for artists to regain control of their masters. In these cases, the only way for an artist to have ownership of masters of their lyrics and compositions is to create new masters of or “remaster” their past work. This consists of completely re-recording any and all songs the artist wishes to gain ownership of. To be clear, in these instances, the artist is still not an owner of the originally recorded versions of their songs, and the record label continues to profit from them. The artist only holds ownership of their remastered versions.
In the past, artists were forced to rely on record labels to promote and distribute their music and videos and thus retained very little leverage in contract negotiations. In our current digital age, though, streaming platforms and social media have made music distribution and marketing far more accessible to new artists. In recent years, artists like Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Chance the Rapper and Kanye West have brought awareness to the danger of traditional contracts with record labels and encouraged new artists not to sign away their masters rights, either by working out a deal with another record label, or opting out all together and recording, promoting and selling their music completely independently.