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Discovery Networks (& Netflix) Corners Composers in Music Royalties Battle

I reached out to so many people and no one would give me any advice on even the reasonable ranges of composers fees for each project I was about to get hire for. I once had a major studio exec tell me my score for their direct-to-video project sounded like a $100,000 creative fee film score 3 decades ago, which I only did with JV-1080s, and the amount they paid me was 25x less than what I should have been paid. Since the studios money is not even their money, it’s public funding from stocks and corporate bonds, there was no excuse for these producers and studio execs to not pay me reasonable composer fees, but they are disgusting people. Decades later one of these producers actually admitted to me out of no where that they could have paid me 25x what I got and lied to me over and over again years earlier when they said this was all they could afford at that time. Total scumbags and they can all rot in hell. I would never work for these losers again no matter how much they want to pay me.
Aw, man, I feel you! There are such scumbags in this business, it's a pity! Had my share of abusive behavior as well. They think they are clever by fucking over a composer (once) but it's really short-sighted, in the end they are driving the quality of their own product and market overall down.
 
so the show writers are going through a similar thing


there are a ton of more shows but studios wanna keep paying less and less. the writers would get back end from syndication but thats dwindling down.
streaming is changing the landscape and broadcasters and tech companies 1st thing to do is cut expenses.. like the back end.

maybe this time we could join them
 
There's hope... From Morgan

Hi everyone! Some very good news. We have been informed today by Discovery Networks that in regard to performance rights, Discovery has decided that their US channels will remain operating as is under the traditional PRO performing rights model. The PMA would like to personally thank Shawn White and everyone at Discovery for this decision. We greatly appreciate this and look forward as a community to working together with Discovery to provide their programming with the best quality music possible.
If anyone has any questions, please email them to me and I will collate them so we can get responses from Discovery and get back to you. My email is [email protected]. Thank you all for your patience, trust and commitment to this matter.
 
Hi everyone! Some very good news. We have been informed today by Discovery Networks that in regard to performance rights, Discovery has decided that their US channels will remain operating as is under the traditional PRO performing rights model. The PMA would like to personally thank Shawn White and everyone at Discovery for this decision. We greatly appreciate this and look forward as a community to working together with Discovery to provide their programming with the best quality music possible.
If anyone has any questions, please email them to me and I will collate them so we can get responses from Discovery and get back to you. My email is [email protected]. Thank you all for your patience, trust and commitment to this matter.

Fantastic news! Thanks for posting.
 
There's hope... From Morgan

Hi everyone! Some very good news. We have been informed today by Discovery Networks that in regard to performance rights, Discovery has decided that their US channels will remain operating as is under the traditional PRO performing rights model. The PMA would like to personally thank Shawn White and everyone at Discovery for this decision. We greatly appreciate this and look forward as a community to working together with Discovery to provide their programming with the best quality music possible.
If anyone has any questions, please email them to me and I will collate them so we can get responses from Discovery and get back to you. My email is [email protected]. Thank you all for your patience, trust and commitment to this matter.
Thank you for letting us know Dirk! Indeed incredibly fantastic news!! And thanks to everyone who participated in this thread, whatever their views, as participation is indeed what it's all about...
 
Agree 100%.

To be honest I’ve never paid much attention to the forums. But having just joined this one to read the consensus on the Discovery news, it’s actually quite disheartening.

There’s a surprisingly large web of disagreements and differences in attitude that I naively thought wouldn’t exist. On top of that there are a huge amount of side gigging composers out there who have something else to do during the day anyway - it just seems near impossible to have real unity when most people don’t depend on this to pay their mortgage. Im sure they have the best intentions, though.

I was so surprised to hear there was no union when I started working in the biz almost 10 years ago and I feel like it’s almost too late for one now as Ive seen the ‘perceived value’ of composers drop year by year and is at an all time low.

It is indeed a sad state of affairs fellow composer!

However if one steps back and looks at this objectively the "music industry" has and always will be an "industry" run by non creative people. As such nothing has changed. Non creative people are only interested in numeric success- they don't give a hoot about artistic merit unless they are firmly reminded that ignoring it is detrimental to their income!

The irony is that both non creative people and us composers alike are goading software development toward AI driven composition. Company executives attitude to the music industry has never changed: they have simply seen a new way to continue there monetary "raison d'être"! Yes! one can call them greedy, money grabbing etc but they have always been this way. It is in fact the digital age itself that was the real catalyst to the likes of Discovery announcing their proposed fiscal intentions at this time.

Composers livelihoods have in fact always been hindered more by technology than corporate greed...

Before Hard Disk took over tape, from the 50s to the early 90s, the sheer cost of analogue machines needed to compose and record music precluded a lot of potentially brilliant composers from earning a living. Composition and production facilities were prohibitively expensive and if you didn't somehow manage to scrape the money together to record to the high fidelity both the A & R or TV/Film executives demanded you simply would't get a look in!

Today everyone can compose, produce and record to a high fidelity standard on digital equipment costing 1000 x less. However the digital composing/recording tools available to all are yet again blocking the composers path. The irony is these software driven tools that we all now use on our laptops are fast taking over the composers roll in his own studio to the point where it almost auto-writes music!... I vouch that in even as soon as a decades time, at least at the lower end of the industry, a lot of composers will have become monitors of AI written music where their roll to creating a composition will simply be a sequence of mouse clicks on the ubiquitous "randomiser" tab on any given VST. Digital algorithms will inevitably become more sophisticated perhaps to the point where composition can auto-adapt to the visual content! Even the engineers roll may well disappear replaced by adaptive ancillary presets fulfilling all tasks of mixing and blending frequency and sonic enhancement. Of course as we all know any robotic task needs fewer human resources to run which will again diminish a composers roll even further, if by that time one can still regard his or her roll as a "composer"!

Also all this "adaptive" music composition software is fast diluting a lot of the very music we create into generic wash. With such sonic power available to all at the flick of a switch or a key assignment it's not surprising that the likes of Discovery sensed a possible move toward AI driven music. Of course they were forgetting the very fact that without a bespoke composers creativity their programs would no longer have the same impact on sales. Indeed if Discovery are to continue putting out quality programs they will need to continue respecting the vital cog in the production of those programs that a human composer fulfils. The same goes for any other program maker that wants to sustain a healthy income.

Yes! I'm painting a depressing notion here but all the signs are there to indicate that AI could become more destructive if we as composers do not remain vigilant in the use of the abundance of modern digital tools we have at our disposal.

I'm all for unionisation and "fighting against the machine" but the question is what really is "the machine" we are fighting against?...!

Every time we all dip into this very website we are perpetuating the development of the AI machine.
 
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Some more detail from Variety:


Sources said that Discovery executives met with top composers over the past few weeks, leading to this turnaround. “I don’t think they thought it through,” one composer said. “It was an economic move by businessmen who didn’t fully understand the ramifications it could possibly have on their internal operations. It would get messy.”
 
Some more detail from Variety:

Well that is good news! Thanks very much for posting this! and I must say what perfect timing of this post on this very thread !!! ;)

As many of us have mentioned here as well as the outrageous insult to a composers livelihood I hope this outcome sets a firm example of why the human composer is essential to support and sustain the growth of quality film and TV production. Thankfully Discovery have seen the light!
I can only commend the composers who convinced Discovery what they were proposing was futile...

Said composer Nathan Barr, a prominent voice in the Your Music Your Future campaign: “I want to acknowledge Discovery’s decision to back down. Had they pushed through, it would have strengthened a movement which is already threatening to turn the occupation of ‘composer’ into a hobby. In a time when music is being devalued in so many markets and platforms, it’s more important than ever to fight for our right as composers to make a living doing so.”
 
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