I got turned on to an artist today. An artist that had me hooked on words alone—if they delivered as promised, they had me as a guaranteed fan.

Turns out, they’re every bit as good as the review said.

The downside is I have to steal their music.

I’m not sure if they ever even sold it, or if they were just giving it away free. Doesn’t matter. Somebody threw a takedown notice at them and they complied.

But anyone with half a brain should know you can’t take anything off the internet. Maybe ten years ago, but people are wise to that shit now. Torrents make it easier than ever, and believe me—when something gets taken down by force, people flock to it. They want it ten times worse than before…but by acting so stingy and selfish, copyright holders are throwing away money. How is that, you might ask? Let me explain, and then you can decide for yourself whether the current system works best.

What this artist is doing is brilliant. They’re called Team Teamwork and so far they’ve released three albums. One is a set of standard mashups, but the other two are incredible mashups of rap and videogame soundtracks. This type of thing will never be a mainstream hit, but there are nerds everywhere who would die to get a copy of Busta Rhymes rapping over the Gerudo Valley theme music. And as much as nerds like to “cheat” the system to get free music, they also show incredible loyalty to what they perceive as a quality product. Something like “Ocarina of Rhyme” would, at the very least, solicit a couple of bucks in a PayPal donation.

But the rights holder says no, forget it, you’re violating our ownership of the original songs. Take it down, scrap it. What happens from there?

  1. The artist takes it down.
  2. Someone (maybe even the artist?) puts up a torrent. It takes 30 seconds.
  3. Someone in the media writes about the takedown. (Pretty much guaranteed these days.)
  4. People SCRAMBLE to get a copy. Demand is through the roof.

You mean an artist has produced music that people want? Well, to hell with that! Ownership trumps everything, apparently.

The problem is, rights holders (don’t even get me started on intellectual property in the first place) are operating under a set of legal precedents that were established way, way before anything like the internet ever existed. There was no way to predict what would happen now that information can be shared globally in an instant.

So, traditionally, the school of thought is that when someone violates a copyright, you shut them down in order to protect your business. That works if someone is hand-printing copies of your book and selling them cheap on the street corner. It doesn’t really work the same if someone is scanning a digital copy of your book and selling it on the internet…you’re talking about two very different things now.

“No,” the rights holder would say. “They are still stealing my copyright and should be punished.”

Not so fast. Remember, people will only seek to provide goods and services that are in demand. If you only publish physical books, and do not sell electronic copies, then it’s clear that people want something you are not providing, and are being forced to look elsewhere.

The same logic applies to music. The artist that produces a mashup of rap and videogame music is not stealing either one. They are creating an entirely NEW product, for which there is SIGNIFICANT demand.

If a rights holder has done the research to know an artist is using their copyrighted material, then the rights holder already knows exactly how much is being used, and what a fair amount would be to charge for it. It’s called licensing. Clearing the sample. Whatever.

It would be to the benefit of the artist AND the original rights holder to negotiate a payment structure moreso than it would be to just demand that they stop creating something that people obviously want.

I don’t know the backstory of this particular situation, but I do know how record companies and other rights holders operate. And they don’t seem to care about the little guys, the up and coming artists. But I would argue that they should, because yeah, maybe they only make a hundred bucks off of Team Teamwork. But the mentality of working WITH an artist rather than AGAINST them will soon pay off, and when there are 40 more artists out there using your material, all of a sudden you’re making $4,000. And it can go up from there.

The solution is mandatory sample licensing, the same way that we already have mandatory mechanical licensing. You can record a cover of any song you want—as long as it’s been released commercially in some form—and no one can stop you from selling it. You just have to pay the licensing fee of a couple cents per track sold.

I know there’s all kinds of arguments about why sample licensing is much more complicated than ordinary mechanical licensing, and it’s not. It isn’t. Just set a price that everyone can agree on—yes, you have to pay the owner of the song and the owner of the sound recording, but who cares? That’s petty shit. Just work out the details, stick a price tag on it and let the artists go to work. That’s where the record companies can recover and begin to earn some trust back from artists as well as consumers.

Say the fee is 10 cents per track, to simplify things. And let’s say each Team Teamwork track has one rap vocal and one piece of videogame music. The guy who owns the rap song gets 10 cents. The guy who owns the videogame music gets 10 cents. Team Teamwork sells the tracks for 99 cents each, and the store takes 15 cents. The artist then earns 44 cents from every sale, and EVERYONE gets paid. And EVERYONE WINS, because now fans can buy the music and the artist doesn’t have to cower in fear just because they want to sample a killer track.

No one wants to hear about some stuffed shirt exec clamping down on a creative artist for stupid, backwards reasons. I don’t care what the reason is, to the consumer it just looks mean.

I wish I could point you to an online store where you could buy Team Teamwork. But sadly the powers that be have decided that’s not a worthy option. So you can download everything for free at the following link:

http://8tracks.com/teamteamwork

Click on each album, and you’ll see a download link right below the audio player. If that fails, there’s always the torrents…