It seems that a rare outbreak of common sense has occurred at the European Union. On 27 March 2009 the Committee of Permanent Representatives (including Britain) would not agree to extend the period of copyright on recordings beyond the present 50 years. So the spectre of multi-national record conglomerates keeping a 95-year grip on all recorded music has been banished - for the present, at any rate. The extension would have affected the whole of recorded jazz.
The record companies represented the proposed extension as self-evidently a Good Thing, but it wasn't. The argument against it, with which, like the Ancient Mariner, I have been badgering all and sundry for the past year, is set out below.
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If you made a record at age 25 and are now aged 75, you will have been enjoying the income (if any) for half a century. That’s half a century to save up for your retirement. How many people expect still to be earning and saving at 75?
I suspect that the fuss is being orchestrated by major record conglomerates, who are grizzling over the possibility of losing the profits from their back-catalogues. This hasn’t bothered them much until recently. I haven’t noticed Universal getting too agitated over Bing Crosby, or Sony losing sleep over Guy Mitchell, but now here comes Elvis, soon to be followed by the Beatles, Motown etc, etc. That’s serious money and they don’t want to let go of it.
When it comes to jazz, which is what principally interests me, the whole thing is a non-starter. Since the 1940s, most of the best jazz records have been made by small labels, run by enthusiasts on a shoestring. Their catalogues were eventually bought up by big companies for peanuts. Look at the history of Blue Note for a classic example. It’s now part of EMI’s portfolio, but EMI never put a penny into the pockets of the musicians who made the classic Blue Note albums. They were paid by Blue Note’s founders, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, two small businessmen who loved the music. They’re both dead. Most of the original artists are dead, too. Extending the copyright period beyond fifty years won’t do Alfred Lion, Francis Wolff or Hank Mobley a lot of good now, will it?
For me, one of the few bright spots in an increasingly gloomy and boring world has been the availability of great jazz recordings from the past, from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five to the first Miles Davis Quintet. For a very reasonable outlay you can assemble a wonderful collection of the finest jazz records ever made. Students can afford them, casual punters can afford them, anyone can afford them. They are to jazz what the Everyman series and the Penguin Classics were to world literature. They’re our heritage, a cultural treasure.
Maybe there’s a case for one slight modification, based on the undeniable fact that we’re all living longer. Acker Bilk famously described ‘Stranger On The Shore’ as his old-age pension and no-one would wish to deprive him of that. Humph was very sporting about the fate of ‘Bad Penny Blues’. So, fair enough, why not say ‘fifty years or until the death of the artist’? That should fix it.
But hand another couple of decades to Universal, EMI and Sony to rake in cash from investments they never made? Come off it! |
