Do I need a "Work for Hire" ??

TMSongwriter

New member
I'm a songwriter and I'm having an online company mix and master one of my songs. Do I need a "work for Hire" Agreement for them to sign? I have in the past had Musicians and singers sign a "Work for Hire" Agreement. Your Thoughts?

Thanks!
 
You don't need a Work for Hire as they are not contributing to the song itself. However, you might want to make clear who owns the masters, recordings, mixes, etc. It might be your song, but if they did the recording, it belongs to them. Same for masters, mixes and such.

Rob, for copyright purposes, a Work for Hire is where you pay someone to provide you with content yet you keep the copyright. An advertising agency might be a good example; where they contact me to write a jingle for a product to air on the radio, TV, etc. I wrote the song, but because they hired me to do it, they own the rights to it. For that to happen, there has to be an executed contract, blah, blah, blah.
 
It might be your song, but if they did the recording, it belongs to them. Same for masters, mixes and such.

Normally it is the person/organisation who paid for the recording who own it but the songwriter always owns the copyright on the song itself so should always receive songwriting royalties. There are also agreements about performer royalties too.

The online company will probably have their terms and conditions available on their website so it is important that you read and understand them.
 
But if you're *paying them* to mix / master (hopefully not the same person), then the recording is the payer's.

Then there's a level of (???) after that whether the mix settings are the "property" of the mixing engineer -- I've seen people argue that. I don't really understand it -- If someone is paying me to mix their stuff, it's their mix. I give them absolutely everything (personally, I don't want the responsibility to archive it anyway). That said - If they don't have the exact same setup as I do (for instance, I'm probably mixing in Samplitude and certainly using a bunch of plugs that the client may not have, plus any analog processing), it isn't going to do them a lot of good anyway. Hell, I've sent photos of the settings that I used on my gear. If it helps them in some way, I have no idea. But they paid, they asked, I don't have any big secrets.
 
Chilli thanks for that. Oddly that's what I always do, give them the right to use the product for X years in X territory, and if they require sole control in that period, as in I can't flog it elsewhere it's built into pricing, it it tun bounces back. It also could be responsible for occasional blips in my experiments with distribution. Somebody in Indonesia shazzamed one of my old pieces of music, how? Where did they hear it?

I rather like dealing with my rights,mount also negotiating use with others. All kinds of interesting things happen, even cease and desist letters! Long time ago but one BIG name got involved in one project when the orchestrator of the hit tried to prevent me using the music, and it turned out he'd accepted a buy out fee for it and had NO rights at all.
 
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