Song lyric & quote print
licensing info post
Written April 2012; Many items may now be out of date
Hey, it’s time to print TJ and Amal Volume 2! Which is going to be
sold! For money! And it contains movie dialogue and copyrighted song lyrics
all over the place!
Shit!
GUESS IT’S TIME TO BUY RIGHTS TO SOME CONTENT.
A quick summary - If you’re also planning on quoting songs or movies in your
published work:
1. Try to avoid it, it’s expensive and a hassle. Cut, parody, or paraphrase
if possible.
2. If you gotta do it, try to keep it to one licensed item.
3. Find who to contact by looking on the sheet music, not in the
album liner notes
4. Allow 2-3 months for response time before press date.
5. READ EVERY LAST BIT OF FINE PRINT in the license agreement before you
sign it. If you don’t understand a clause, don’t be afraid to ask.
6. It’s up to you to keep following up - don’t sit and wait for them to get
back to you. If it’s been over 2 or 3 weeks, check in. And again.
Anyway, the details: (WARNING: THIS IS SERIOUSLY FUCKING LONG)
WHO TO CONTACT AND HOW TO FIND THEM
Okay, so I spent about two days desperately poring over album liner notes
and calling record labels, only to find that music rights and lyrics
rights are two very different beasts. Fortunately, @mcruthless saved
the day by suggesting I look up the sheet music!
So. Go to musicnotes.com and look up the sheet music for the song
you need. Just type the song title into the search bar and it should come
up.
So, for example:
You’ll only be able to view the first page, but that’s fine, because that’s
where the copyright info is! Down at the bottom, you’ll see something like:
Musicnotes.com won’t have everything, but it’s a good place to check
first. If it’s not there, then try just Googling “[song title] sheet music”,
and you should be able to find a scan or transcript.
You can also just try searching the artist or song title at http://ascap.com.
If it’s a smaller independent band and you can’t find it on musicnotes.com
or ASCAP, try contacting the record label.
So the copyright holder on the lyrics is Dick James, but rights are
administered by Universal/Polygram. A quick Google reveals Dick James is
defunct, so let’s go to Universal Music Publishing instead. (Universal owns
Polygram.)
Click “License Music” and it should refer you to one or two e-mail
addresses. Most licensing requests are for use of the song itself,
like in an ad or movie, so you may get bounced to someone else who
specifically handles lyrics or print stuff instead. It varies depending on
company.
Now, this isn’t “visit site, go through cart, buy rights” - in most cases,
it simply pointed me to a particular e-mail address to contact. Each license
is investigated before it’s granted, so you won’t be able to buy rights
immediately; it’s gotta get checked out by the licensing division first, and
that take a few weeks. (Licensing the Back to the Future movie
dialogue was a lot faster, but I’ll cover that further down.)
Each licensor I contacted had a different setup. Carlin Music and EMI had a
set licensing system already in place; Merge Records, a smaller outfit, just
went by e-mail and forwarded my request to the singer/songwriter himself.
So now let’s cover…
WHAT TO INCLUDE IN YOUR INITIAL LICENSE REQUEST
These are the factors that determine what sort of license you need and how
much it will cost!
- Song title
- Band
- Album
- Who wrote the lyrics
- Title of your book
- Brief summary of your book (“two strangers go on a road trip across
America and fall for each other” was mine)
- The scene and context the lyrics appear in, and how much of the lyrics are
used (e.g. “TJ sings the first two lines of the song as he comes out of the
shower”). Some licensors will ask you to elaborate on this, probably to
prevent derogatory/defamatory use.
- Production budget for your book
- Retail/cover price
- Number of copies to be printed
- Self-published or through a publisher? If so, what publisher?*
- Is there a deal for bookstore distribution? (e.g. is Random House going to
be sending this out to Barnes & Noble stores, is it going to be on
Amazon, etc.)
- Will your comic be sold just in your country, or worldwide?
- Are you using the lyrics in advertising/promoting your book?
* Even if your book is coming out through a major publisher, it is
still your responsibility – not the publisher’s – to handle these
licenses! Most publishing contracts include a clause where the author
frees the publisher of any liability or responsibility for damages arising
from the book’s content, so it is up to you to C your own A.
THE MFN CLAUSE: READ THE FINE PRINT
In the process of trying to license the “Transatlanticism” lyrics, I
encountered a little thing called the “most favored nation” or “most favored
customer” clause.
It’s better to show than tell, here, so: click
here to see the agreement.
Basically, what it means is that you gotta pay all the licensors you
work with the same amount for lyrics rights, and that “same amount” is
the highest fee quoted to you. So basically, if I’m trying to license one
song from EMI and one song from Warner, and EMI asks for $100 and Warner
asks for $200, I have to pay EMI $200 as well.
MFN/MFC clauses are pretty common all over the entertainment industry, so
you should probably expect one if you’re doing licensing like this. If
you’re just licensing one song, this shouldn’t be a problem!
However, since I was attempting to license SIX SONGS, I decided to hold off
on finalizing any agreements till I knew whether or not those fees would
break the bank.
OTHER STUFF
Aside from the fee, most licensors will also ask for you to sign and mail
agreement paperwork (snail-mail; only one licensor accepted a PDF), plus one
copy of your book (when it’s available) for their records.
WHAT I LICENSED, HOW MUCH IT COST, HOW (& WHETHER) IT HAPPENED, AND
HOW LONG IT TOOK
Normally I don’t like to talk dollar figures, but I think the usefulness of
this info outweighs the bad manners. The figures below are for a
self-published, self-distro run of 2,000 comics, $15.00 cover price. If
you’ve got a novel coming out through Del Rey or a GN coming out through Top
Shelf or something it’ll likely be a good bit higher, but anyway…
CONTENT, LICENSE FEE, AND TURNAROUND TIME, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
[Not song lyrics; skip this one if you want] Dialogue excerpts from “Back to the Future”
$500.00 (2 excerpts at $250.00 each)
Time to secure: 20 days
Submitted the initial request through Universal Pictures’ licensing shopping
cart system on 6/8; received a phone call from a licensing rep a few hours
later. There was some weird back-and-forth between Universal and Amblin due
to confusion over what a self-published graphic novel was ( :| ), but I
wound up working over the phone with the Universal rep. The fee was per
excerpt rather than per line, so to keep costs down, I cut the
script from this page (replaced it with music notes) and cut this
page entirely (also cut that page to preserve a 2-page spread later on
:U)
It’s worth mentioning that this process went a lot faster and more smoothly
than the lyrics stuff - Universal Pictures licenses SO MUCH MATERIAL on a
daily basis that they have a really streamlined system in place.
First 4 lines of Fleet Foxes’ “Drops in the River”
$N/A
Time to secure: N/A (license could not be secured in time for print due to
band tour)
Contacted BMG/Chrysalis, Inc. via e-mail on Friday 6/8. Band rep asked for a
transcript of the scene, and the full book as a PDF, which I provided.
Contacted again after receiving no word; rep then let me know they wouldn’t
be able to handle licensing issues before the book went to press. [Something
exciting is filling in here! Will make an announcement about that when it is
also finished.]
First 4 lines of Death Cab For Cutie’s “Transatlanticism”
$100.00 ($150.00 due to MFN clause)
Time to secure: 5 days / 39 days
Contacted EMI Music via e-mail on Friday 6/8; on Monday the EMI license rep
referred me to Hal Leonard Permissions. Filed with Hal Leonard and had
license purchase within the hour. Received license agreement paperwork 5
days later but held off on signing until 7/17, when the other vital
properties were taken care of.
First 4 lines of Destroyer’s “Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux (Sea of
Tears)”
$N/A (request denied)
Time to secure: N/A
Contacted Merge Records via website form Thursday 6/7. Request was forwarded
to singer/songwriter Dan Bejar, who denied it 8 days later. Lyrics in book
have been replaced with music note SFX and Amal just humming along.
[the Toby Keith “Angry American” lyrics have been removed entirely and
replaced with made-up lyrics]
First verse & chorus of Nazareth’s “Hair of the Dog”
$150.00
Time to secure: 32 days
Contacted Carlin Music (UK) via e-mail on Friday 6/8. Heard back from
licensing rep 6 days later. Sent requested relevant info and comic pages.
Received license permission & info 6/20; sent payment by mail.
Agreements signed 7/10.
First 2 lines of Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun”
$N/A
Time to secure: N/A; licensor did not return calls or emails
Decided to alter words to paraphrase instead of quote. (Reader should be
able to guess what song is being referenced even if the lyrics are wrong.)
First 2 lines of Lerner & Loewe’s “C'est Moi”
$N/A
Time to secure: N/A; licensor did not return contact at all
Decided to alter words to paraphrase instead of quote. (It’s not important
that TJ’s singing “C'est Moi” so much as that he’s singing a pompous song
about a knight.)
First 4 lines of George Gershwin’s “Summertime”
$105.55 ($150.00 due to MFN clause)
Time to secure: 39 days
(I mistakenly assumed “Summertime” was in the public domain because it is 77
years old. Good thing I double checked!) Contacted the Gershwin Estate via
e-mail Monday 6/11; they referred me to the licensor within the hour.
E-mailed back and forth clarifying usage details for a couple of days before
request was submitted back from the publisher to the estate for approval.
Received no word from estate for a month. Checked in again and got licensing
paperwork on 7/17.
TOTAL RIGHTS FEES: $950.00 ($450.00 for music)
So yeah, that’s… that’s a lot, but it’s what I’m paying to NOT spend several
weeks and a lot of heartache completely stripping out and redoing some vital
scenes. (Or altering important bits enough that it would throw an informed
reader out of the story.)
I was shortsighted and wasn’t even thinking about rights
issues/publishing when I wrote those bits; I was just having the guys be
themselves, singing real songs that they like. But it’s definitely something
I’m keeping in mind for Volume 3. Fortunately, I think there’s only one song
that gets quoted in that.
CONCLUSION
Overall, this process was an expensive pain in the ass, but it was a
learning experience, and I’m glad I did it.
The pain-in-the-ass part was the digging for rights holder & contact
info and w-a-i-t-i-n-g for responses; actually dealing with the
licensors was fine. IDK what I was expecting, I guess standoffish Hollywood
types or something, but the folks I spoke with were really helpful. Which
makes sense - they have something to sell, you want to purchase it, it’s
good business.
Could I have printed and sold Volume 2 without getting in trouble? Most
likely. It’s probably vain and ridiculous to think my tiny book would
attract any big eyes. BUT. Licensing this content through the proper
channels bumps the risk from “low” to “zero”, and more importantly,
1. the songwriters whose music appears will get some royalties out of the
use of their material, and 2. the songwriter who denied the license request
retained control over how his work is used.
And as an artist myself, I can definitely appreciate that.
Anyway, thanks for reading! When I first set out to license this material, I
could not find ANY solid info or any sort of guide, so I hope this helps a
few comic authors or novelists out there!
