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Indie Label Signing Practices OR Oral Contracts Are Bad But Oral Sex Is Still OK

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Damnable Fiend:
I was thinking about this the other day.  Without some sort of contract or copyright in writing is it possible to do anything if someone tries to claim your music as their own?

David_Dovey:
Honestly tommy I really have no idea why you are trying to talk circles around this issue instead of just directly answering the question. Am I completely misunderstanding something here?

Let me try:


--- Quote from: tricia kidd on 18 Feb 2010, 14:09 ---why did he feel it was his right to keep the physical master tapes well after the cost of recording and promoting the albums had been recouped?  why did he not respect the artists' wishes to own their own art, even after said art had made him a good profit?

--- End quote ---

He did not why did he not respect the artists' wishes to own their own art because that was strictly counter to the agreement Rusk made with the BS (appropriate acronym if I've ever seen one), the same agreement he made without a problem with the dozens of artist who are or have been on T&G. Namely, the artist receives a royalty rate that is literally 10 times the industry standard, royalties that they would begin making far earlier than usual due to not having to recoup any advance . In exchange for this T&G reserved the right to continue selling the records the BS made with T&G for as long as they chose to keep them in print, whether or not BS was still with the label anymore. Rusk was only doing exactly what he and BS had agreed on, an agreement that had in fact proved quite lucrative for the band, far moreso than if they were operating under a standard recording contract.

The problem is that BS wanted to have their cake and eat it. They wanted the ludicrously high royalty rate (hell they wanted an increase to 80%!), plus the rights to their back catalog, leaving T&G with effectively nothing. Corey Rusk is a magnanimous guy, no doubt, but homeboy still needs to eat.

TL:DR; He felt he had the right to keep the tapes + continue to press BS records because they said he could

David_Dovey:
OK so it would seem that the Butthole Surfers contradict that but let's be fair they're notorious acid casualties who are also given to saying shit like


--- Quote ---"But after three years of living on the road in squalor, we wanted to have what Corey had--a house, cars, exotic animals....Corey's always made much more money off the catalog than I did. A dollar for Corey, 20 cents for Paul Leary--I'd want that deal for perpetuity too"
--- End quote ---


--- Quote ---"You could also say Touch and Go is greedy for wanting to keep taking 50 percent of the profits forever, or to keep the records when they weren't doing as much work anymore.  There's no punk-rock moral high ground here."
--- End quote ---

i.e; there is some pretty heavy delusion and denial here, born of a a completely fucking irrational paranoia, like Corey Rusk was getting rich off of Butthole Surfers records, while they played suffering artist.

I'm getting pretty heavily into hearsay here but honestly I'd be far less surprised someone who is capable of saying shit like that with a straight face would misrepresent the truth of the oral agreement than someone who has literally the testimonials of everyone else he has worked with not to mention that his side of the story is that he made the same deal he made with everyone?

Ptommydski:

--- Quote from: David_Dovey on 19 Feb 2010, 01:03 ---TL:DR; He felt he had the right to keep the tapes + continue to press BS records because they said he could
--- End quote ---

I said this about six times in two different threads. It's never going to make a difference unless you actually consider making a verbal agreement with a friend who fully honours their part of it to be worth exactly shit. You and I might think that's fucked up but it's never going to dawn on some people for the reasons I've already broached. Certain people are never going to understand that this situation momentarily threatened the existence of an honour based system which is integral to the existence of the independent music community. This entire debacle nearly kicked out the foundations of not just Touch & Go but everybody who operated on the system, which is borderline every independent record label worth a damn. I don't expect it to mean shit to a tourist so I'm not going to waste my time trying to explain basic ethics when if it hasn't sunk in now it never will.


--- Quote from: David_Dovey on 19 Feb 2010, 01:03 ---The problem is that BS wanted to have their cake and eat it. They wanted the ludicrously high royalty rate (hell they wanted an increase to 80%!), plus the rights to their back catalog, leaving T&G with effectively nothing. Corey Rusk is a magnanimous guy, no doubt, but homeboy still needs to eat.
--- End quote ---

More to the point, he's running a record label which employs a number of people and funds, manufactures and distributes hundreds of bands. He has responsibilities which outweigh merely eking out an existence and certainly more so than funding the recreational drug habits of trust-fund dilletantes playing Exploding Plastic Inevitable. If it wasn’t for the existence of Touch & Go and their ilk, music as we know and love it wouldn’t be the same. Again, I know this means exactly dick to most people and that’s fine by me.

David_Dovey:
It probably doesn't hurt also that doing a cursory bit of research into the history of the Butthole Surfers reveal that they've turned burning personal+professional bridges into a fine art. Context makes this whole debate a bit more clear-cut than those coming into this with no prior knowledge of BS's behaviour would think.

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