Super Leviathan

It really depends on the effort studios make to clear music. If, for whatever reason, a song is too expensive or the rights can't obtained, that's understandable and a certain benefit of the doubt can be granted.

It's other cases that make people sore. Paramount has a bad reputation (as of late) for indiscriminately hacking out any song that might require clearance on a lot of their sets. Same deal with Fox on the WKRP set; it's sort of painfully obvious that they didn't even ATTEMPT to try and clear 98% of the music.

That having been said, possibly the most unforgivable case of "music licensing" is the Muppet Family Christmas. songs like "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" are deleted, yet pretty much every other show on DVD that has used those songs got to retain them.

wm lopez

Why did THE SOPRANOS use classic rock songs on their t.v. shows if this will be a problem?
The solution to all this is once your paid for your song to be in a movie or t.v. show that's it. No matter what kind of new technology it will be re-leased you were paid for that job.

BuckNaked2k

Sometimes the rights to home video release are negotiated up front, that way there is no issue once it's time to change medium.

Shows like WKRP, Northern Exposure, etc. where made before the advent of the DVD revolution, and nobody (including the studios) had any idea that TV on DVD would be such a success.

man*machine

I'm pretty sure the record labels, even today, are very adamant about milking as much money as possible out of a licensed song for every separate format. The tv and film studios can't tell the record compannies to just "give us one cheap price for all future media" and that's that. They probably have to deal with each issue separately. In the case of current tv-shows, the tv-studios may still just end up licensing ONLY broadcast rights for songs because the record label wants tons more money if the studios also want DVD or future media rights. And what if the show flops and the tv-studio decides to never put it out on DVD. In those cases, they would have lost even more money by paying in advance for all that extra media usage they will never use. It's a greedy business.

macnorton

A show like that has a ton of $$$ in the production budget, so I am 100% sure that they ponyed up plenty to make sure every song made it to the DVD.

macnorton

Interesting. I suppose when you think about it, that does make a lot of sense. But Shout's budget still comes from Sony, right? So again, the money is coming from the same place, just a different of hands.

cracksky

What I don't understand is how Fox can all but ignore most of the original music cues for the first season of WKRP yet somehow pay for all 11 seasons of music in both M*A*S*H and The Simpsons (and there's a lot in both shows).

Everyone in this thread should write their congressperson and explain how the copyright laws need updating and licensing fees need limits because the greed in the music industry is out of control.

The Catch-22 right now is if you don't support product with replaced/altered music then you likely won't get another season. That's a chance I'm willing to take on principle especially for shows like 'KRP.

The Sopranos sets are $100 a pop for the music no doubt.

David Levine

Nope. Shout is (I believe) a privately owned company. At one time they were distributed by Sony, but now Vivendi handles that. They aren't clearing stuff because they have tons of studio money behind them, they do it out of love for what they do and the properties they care for.

rw2516

MASH and The Simpsons are way more popular than WKRP and probably sell a lot more making it easier to recoup the cost of the music. Another thing about WKRP is that wer're dealing with classic rock. Probably the most expensive music rights there are. When they made the show back in '78-81 the broadcast rights were so high they couldn't afford film and shot the show on videotape. A lot of this stuff isn't even available for licensing on cd compilations like "Hits of the 70s" type stuff. We're talking Springsteen, The Who, Pink Floyd, John Lennon, Fleetwood Mac, Rolling Stones, Supertramp.
This is the one show I'm willing to cut the studio slack on with music rights. If I was Fox I'd take pre-orders at $150/season and if I got enough orders to buy the rights I'd then make the dvds. If not I'd refund the money.

David Levine

Simpsons is in a different stratosphere than most TV shows. Most studios would be thrilled to do 30% of the Simpsons TENTH season numbers on their own FIRST seasons.

Absolutely. WKRP and The Wonder Years are 2 of the main shows that are generally considered "unclearable".

Jon2

Good luck with that.

I can't imagine anyone in the music industry... song writer, composer, musician, vocalist, lawyer, label executive, anyone... willing to allow music to be used under those terms.

Nick Danger

I can imagine that a lot of phone calls went this way:

"Hi, I'm John from [one of the big five multibillion dollar media conglomerates]. We're working on a DVD release of a once-popular television program. Your band has 48 seconds of music in one of the episodes, and we'd like to buy the rights. We'll pay you royalties of $48 for every thousand units sold. We're talking about hundreds of dollars here, money that the whole band can share! I don't think that this is a chance that you can afford to pass up! Hello? Hello?"

mlvc6969

This really drives me nuts, i bought the entire Soul Food series on DVD and only Season 1 was complete and unedited but Seasons 2-5 have the music changed on many of the episodes but the annoying part is many scenes had musical guests singing in a club and the editing they did to take it out was so noticeable and many important scenes ended up on the cutting room floor because of the greediness of the music industry.

calhoun07

Gee, then we'd be like the UK. Wouldn't that be wonderful!

The part about the music rights issue I've never been able to grasp (and I know I've brought this up before, and though some have tried to explain it, i still can't wrap my head around it) is take a show like Everwood (or any show on WB/CW that features popular songs.) The shows on those networks tend to use music from the Warner Brothers library. Warner makes the show, Warner makes the music. Then there is an issue when we want to get the shows on DVD and rights have to be cleared for the songs. WHAT THE HELL? It's like Warner owns it all, so why is there an issue at all.

And the same could be said of any TV show being produced today...these are major studios making these shows, and they have rights to music through record labels they own, so use the music from those CDs and there should be no music issues.

Perhaps that line of thinking just makes sense to me.

cracksky

This statement is utter bullshit and why this thread is here in the first place.

The popularity of a show should have zero bearing on how much it cost for music clearances. This is why things must change NOW.

Things are being run like the fucking mob for chrissake.

Rubix

this is why i own ZERO seasons of the felicity dvd sets. and it's one of my favorite "newer" tv shows. it ran from 1998 to 2002.

DJariya

I'm confused. I own seasons 2-4 and I never read anything about music being replaced. Plus, the Felicity sets are freaking expensive at around $40-50 a set still.

rw2516

Most(not all) artists own and control their music not the label. A label cannot do whatever they want with it. There is also the songwriter aspect. You cannot just record a cover of a song for a movie or tv show either.

macnorton

Ok...I thought they were a division on Sony, would make no sense.

Also, the a couple posters above, a shows popularity most certainly does play a factor. Shows like The Simpsons, Mash and The Sopranos are going to clear a million units for every season and at $25 a pop on average (I know The Sopranos as more, but I am just using the example), that is a ton of cash to be made. Since they know it will be a huge return, the studio would spend a million to clear all the songs.

rw2516

The popularity of the show has nothing to do with the cost of the music. But if a show is real popular more dvds will sell, thus making it profitable to shell out the money to use the song.

calhoun07

Well, then as another poster stated earlier, then write the contracts differently. In fact, I read that new contracts for TV shows would include clauses to use the songs in DVD releases, yet it still continues to be a problem.

calhoun07

I think they understand it VERY well. That doesn't mean money comes flying out of their ass to get the DVD releases you want with uncut music, however. They are still a business and still need to make money and they aren't going to invest more in a TV show than they think they could make off of it.

David Levine

Your answer has absolutely nothing to do with the statement I made.

I did not mention "show popularity" of WKRP and Wonder Years. They are unclearable because of the music used throughout them. Too many songs in them are either A) Too expensive to clear or B) Not even available to clear. There are a number of artists who flat out refuse to allow their songs to be used for DVD release.

And no, popularity of a show doesn't have a bearing on music clearance costs - popularity has a bearing on how much a studio is willing to pay for music clearance. There is a big difference between spending 1 million dollars clearing a show that is going to sell 500,000 units and one that will sell 7,500 units. In the first case you are adding 2.00 to the cost of each unit. In the second, you are adding 133.33 to each.

cracksky

Maybe my response was unclear but only the first paragraph was in answer to your statement. I added further thoughts in the next paragraph.

They are only currently 'unclearable' because of the criminal activity going on within the record industry today that needs to stop. If they weren't making the rules up as they go over there and there were actual hard and fast laws enforced with strict penalties, I'm sure we'd see every single artist come in line pretty damn quick.

Sales figures for titles like WKRP are useless to compare when almost no one bought it because the songs were raped from it. It's never gonna sell Simpsons numbers but it still has a huge fan base.

David Levine

That's because those clauses include considerably more money because they are paying the costs of the music licensing for the DVDs upfront.

A lot of it is going to be depend on the "DVD potential" of the show. At this point, most new shows make it to DVD, but not all - especially ones that die during or right after their first year. And some shows that don't do well in the ratings still can be killer DVD titles.