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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! > Song Marketing Question
Song Marketing Question
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LSC
759 posts
Aug 27, 2016
11:58 AM
I recently wrote a song for my step-daughters wedding to be played during the procession after being unable to find anything on a Google search. Didn't seem to be anything out there. I've won some notice for songwriting and had a couple of things covered. This tune came out pretty good in my opinion and there may be a niche market for it.

What I was trying to figure out is how one could go about selling an individual song, not necessarily a recording of the song but the use of the song itself as a one off for a particular event. I'm familiar with both performance and mechanical royalty collection but this would seem to fall outside the normal parameters of the usual collection methods. I'm a voting member of PRS for Music, the UK equivalent of BMI or ASCAP.

Any ideas or thoughts?

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LSC
nacoran
9210 posts
Aug 27, 2016
5:01 PM
No idea, but I'd be fascinated to find out. I've always been more interested in writing songs for other people to perform than the actual performing part myself.

I do know in regular written word writing there are different types of licenses you can sell like, for instance, First American Publishing Rights, which would mean that you were selling the rights for a company to publish your article once, in the U.S. market. You then aren't allowed to publish in the U.S. anywhere else for X amount of time, but are free to publish it in Europe or elsewhere, and once they've published it you are eventually allowed to publish it again in the U.S. after a certain amount of time (although you couldn't sell the First American rights again, since you only get one 'first' in any market.) I seem to remember Europe has something called something like moral rights, which means even if you gave or sold all your rights you still have some small control over what it can be used for. I think the Beatles used this to sue Nike when Nike used Revolution in a commercial. The Beatles didn't own the rights anymore, but had the moral rights, which meant they could veto uses which they felt didn't fit with the intent of the song.

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Nate
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First Post- May 8, 2009
LSC
761 posts
Aug 27, 2016
8:06 PM
The more I think about it I think it's probably impossible in the context I was thinking of. I think perhaps the only way forward would be to record the song and offer it as a download. If some cat is going to buy it and then have his friend play it that's no different than what everybody does who covers a song at a small gig or event.

Although this song was specifically written for my step-daughter and her fiance' it's generic enough yet describes circumstance that are not uncommon. Her mother actually wrote 95% of the lyric. Took her six months. I tweaked it a bit and put some structure to it along with the melody, chords, etc.
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LSC


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