I hope you dont mind but i just have a few questions regarding all this copyright and licensing stuff..
Now I am theoretically setting an online business at the moment, which i wish to turn into reality one day so Im doing all my research extra early.
Myself and my partner want to begin an online business. The business is an online Digital Label for Techno-Drum and bass artists mainly. We want to sign artists who are not yet so well known but however have exceptional tunes.
To sell the tracks we want to distribute them to a max of 2 major online digital stores such as juno and Itunes and we also want to sell the tracks through our own label website.
We have contacted APRA (Australasias performance copyright association), and they sent us an agreement that we apparently sign which contains many many things that we CANNOT do with our artists music. The artists themselves lets us do more with their work than APRA lets us do with our artists own work!
My question is: If i make a written agreement stating the rights of the artists and the label and in what way we can use their work and they agree in order to be under our label, do we really by law, need to sign up to these big collection societies?
What can we do to avoid this?
I was thinking in my contract I can present the idea of "creative commons" to the artists so we can have more freedom of their work and avoid these absurd things the collective society are asking us to do.
All help is very greatly appreciated :)
Thanks!
Sofia Devetak
