Copyright issue.

[Original Beef]

A band I know have asked me to do a live recording of a gig next week. They are a covers band and I would like to put some of the songs on my website to offer my services to other bands etc. Would this get me into trouble with the PRS or some other body if they were to chance on the recordings on my site? I heard somewhere a long time ago that it's ok to use small snippets of each song say 10-20 seconds but I am not sure of the validity of this statement. Any help gratefully received.

[ImagineerTom]

You want to use songs someone else wrote, performed using someone else's money, someone else made popular and which are then performed by someone else (so that's 4 other people's work) to promote your business/services (ie you want to use them to make money) and you're wondering if there's going to be any issues......

 

You need either individual permission from each of the people (or their representatives in the chain) or they may be covered by the blanket licenses issued by the PRS & MCPS but standby to be surprised at how expensive it will be.

 

There is a "fair use" clause within all copyright law so it could be argued that a short clip used for descriptive purposes might not need licensing; but that would have to be on a NON COMMERCIAL page (ie if you have a blog then you could say "here's a clip of a very complicated mix I did last week") and you should be aware that every major record label and music publishers pay people to trawl the internet looking for people using their music and automatically firing takedown requests to ISP's. Also a "short clip" isn't going to be very useful to prospective clients as a demonstration of your skill; more of your ability to choose the 15 seconds you actually got right....

 

The short answer is - it's not worth the hassle

[Jivemaster]

As above. all the "fair use" freedoms are for editorial, review and fair comment purposes. The more valuable the song/artiste/writer then the more expensive will commercial use licensing cost you.

 

For your self promotion purposes you would do well to find an original song written by the band and negotiate a minimal price for shared use of the recording that you make.

[Original Beef]

Thanks for your input. Unfortunately the band don't do any original material or I would have gone down this route in the first place. I do however have some recordings of a musical group / choir, and this is all original material so with their permission I will use this to promote.

[peza2010]

out of interest what would be the legalities of embedding something from youtube that you didn't upload?

[paulears]

PRS will be interested, and have special website licenses - not much paperwork, but you will have to pay, and it's not that cheap. The details are on their web site. PPL won't - because you're not using original material.

 

This page covers the likely use you have in mind - and is the limited version of the full license and it covers downloads and streaming. It's £122+VAT a year. You do need to tell them at the end of the year how much was used, so that means (at least for me) that you just use Google Analytics, enter a bit of code on the page, and then you can keep track of how many times it's accessed. If you charge the band - don't forget that any other music will be covered for free? So even if they only pay a proportion, you can usually make it work, money wise.

 

You can do the youtube link, and that gets around it - but you have to keep testing because youtube are improving their copyright database all the time, and even if it works this week, next may be different - so it either fails, or insists on playing an advert for tampax before each listen!

[Original Beef]

I must admit I did think about youtube last night so thanks for the feedback. That may well be a way around it although not perfect. Thanks Paul for the suggestion of the license. I will however give that a raincheck as it seems too much bother and a bit too expensive for me to do. Cheers.