Follow Ups:Category: Legal Issues
From: d-dmusic (David Tkaczuk)
To: ALL
Date Posted: June 10, 2002 at 10:35:17
Subject: Placing Songs "on-hold" for an unsigned artist.
Here's a new one for me and a situation which could be a little "dicey."
We are currently working with an artist who needs songs for her project. (She is a very good singer with quite the local following.) She won studio/radio time and her songs are being requested, for purchase as well, long after the contest was completed.
So, we contacted TAXI and ran a listing. We received 30 songs from TAXI that they narrowed down from 200+ submissions. 4 of the
songs are very, very good and she would like to record them.Here now is the dilemma. Our young singer, though very talented, is currently unsigned. We would like to record these 4 songs for a
4 song demo to shop to major/independant lables but to place these songs "on hold" for our unsigned artist would be asking a bit too much.However, what if the composers say go ahead and record them without any agreement and then 3 weeks later they get an offer from a major publisher and then tell us that we can no longer use these songs. It's a bit of a tricky situation.
What is fair ? Are there any standards for this kind of thing ?
Needing advice. (We don't write in this style otherwise we just would have done it ourselves)