Originally Posted By: Noel96
Will,

A couple of thoughts that came to mind as I read your post were...

1. If the song isn't doing anything and you'd pretty much forgotten all about it, then maybe getting paid something for it is not a bad way to go.

The conversion for Euro to Au is 200 = $320 (Au) -- that, at it's worst, pays for Band In A Box.

2. This might be that door-opening song. Personally, I would be tempted to take to the offer and see where it leads. It might lead nowhere but then again, getting into the music industry is all about lucky breaks and this could be something like that. As I see it, at the end of the day, it's just one song and not everything you've written.

From this perspective, it could be worth the experiment.

The precautions that I would take would be....

(a) Have a clause in the contract that says something along the lines that usage of the work is not transferred to the company by you until the promised money is paid in full.

(b) Find out about publisher royalties as well as artist/performance royalties.

(c) Register the song with a recognised copyright agency before passing it on (I use copyright.gov in the US -- it's $50US to register a single song if I recall correctly)

(d) I would not consider any deal that involved me having to pay the company that wanted my work. This could be in the form of something like an upfront fee to submit the work.

Hope these thoughts are useful for you.

Regards,
Noel


What Noel said. It is a great track and if they want to pay 200 EURO for the rights for 5 years, well, that is more than I have earned in the 5 years that I have been releasing my music (and I have well over 100 tracks recorded and released). So I would say, read the contract carefully and make sure you don't have to pay THEM anything, ever Get the money, and use it to invest in your music making capabilities and write some new stuff! I believe that miracles DO still happen.

Hundreds of Backing Tracks here Band-in-a-Box Files