Sheet Music & Copyright Law

Remember Napster? 

Back in 1999 the only legal way to acquire a recording of a song was purchasing the entire CD that included it. Napster was the first peer-to-peer online file sharing service whereby you could download an MP3 file of any song available on the site, as well as upload music you owned so that others could also enjoy it. It was an expedient and free way to get your hands on anything you wanted to listen to. Sometimes you could even find MP3s of songs by your favorite bands when the album had yet to be released. 

It was awesome. It was also a spectacular copyright violation. Artists and record labels naturally sued, and Napster shut down in 2001.

However, Napster was created in response to a major paradigm shift in the ways consumers wanted to acquire and listen to music. We wanted the freedom to buy single songs rather than entire albums. We wanted our music packaged in flexible formats so that we could listen to them on our computers then, as well as portable MP3 players now. At first the recording industry fought this shift, but in the end the market prevailed and copyright law underwent massive changes. 10 years after Napster folded, you can purchase and download a song from the iTunes store and copy it to as many devices as you wish. Legally, these copies are supposed to be for your personal use, but there isn't anything to prevent you from sharing the file with a friend.

The internet is here to stay. It has exponentially increased the speed and ease with which information of all kinds can be shared. Like the recording industry, eventually every organization that trades in material protected by copyright law will have to embrace the new paradigm and adjust their business models accordingly. 

Right now most of them are still fiercely defending the status quo. 

About a year ago my husband persuaded me that we should cancel our cable TV subscription. While we watch very little television, when he first raised the possibility I instantly dismissed the idea because of my obsession with Dexter. He then pointed out that I was willing to pay $100+ per month so that over the course of a year I could watch some 12 hours of television. You can see that this basically means I'm paying $100+ for each episode. 

 I am a huge fan of this show. I desperately want to pay Showtime a reasonable fee so that I can stay current with what my favorite serial killer is up to. But as things now stand, the only way they'll sell me that opportunity comes with a lot of other stuff I don't want and an exorbitant price. 

We canceled our subscription. Now the only money Showtime gets from us is whatever revenue they receive when we rent the Dexter season DVDs from Netflix. 

It may take some time for enough other households to have the same kind of reaction, but this is the trend: we want to watch what we want to watch when we want to watch it. We want to pay for the things we want and not for the things we don't. And the technology is now in place to make this possible. The old paradigm of expensive cable TV packages will gradually become less profitable and Showtime will find some way to let me watch Dexter again (assuming he survives long enough). 

Comedy Central has already figured this out. You can watch full episodes of many of their shows online for free if you don't mind waiting a few days after they first air. You can purchase and download individual episodes of The Daily Show on iTunes if you want them sooner. 

Which brings me to the reason for this post: The same basic paradigm shift is well underway where published musical scores are concerned. 

It's illegal to photocopy copyright-protected music. 

You all do it anyway. You have been doing it since long before the rise and fall of Napster. 

You don't do it to steal it. 

When you photocopy a score, the vast majority of the time you are making copies from a score you already own. You make photocopies to avoid lugging around a pile of heavy books when all you need is just a few pages from each one. You make photocopies and put them in a binder to make it easier for your accompanist to turn pages. Maybe sometimes you even use a scanner to make digital copies of songs and arias so that you can email them to a colleague, which is much faster, cheaper and safer than packing up a score and mailing it (not to mention decreasing your carbon footprint). 

But rather than asking how they can meet our actual needs and turn a profit at the same time, the music publishing industry continues vehemently trying to put a stop to all this. 

As big a fan as I am of Dexter, I am obviously a MUCH bigger fan of composers, scholars who create Urtext scores, and music publishers. Those of you who know me know what an edition wonk I am. I'll buy another copy of a score I already own if the new version is more accurate. I am effusively grateful for the work of composers, scholars and publishers and I want them to be paid well for their work. 

But if they really want singers to stop making photocopies, why not ask how they can meet our needs better while making a profit doing it? 

Just follow the example of the recording industry: Make digital versions of your scores available for download, both as complete works and as individual songs, arias, etc. You'll massively reduce many of your production and shipping costs and waste less paper. Then, like the recording industry, get over the fact that we're going to print out more than one copy and that some of those copies will occasionally be used by people who didn't pay for them. Sites like Sheet Music Direct and Schubertline are already raking in business you could be enjoying by providing this service. But they can't meet the needs of edition wonks like me. 

Make your best stuff and latest scholarship available to purchase and download. We will buy it. Do us an even bigger favor and make it possible to transpose your songs, and you will definitely find more customers!

I want to bring some attention to this issue now because I chair the NATS-NYC Student Auditions, and my NATS chapter is concerned about the way copyright law impacts our students. The National Association of Teachers of Singing fiercely supports the music publishing industry, as well they should! However, enforcing current copyright law at our events now means requiring students to bring published scores for all their audition repertoire and requiring their pianists to perform from these scores. This is a problem because bound scores often do not easily stay open to the page you're playing, the pages are more difficult to turn than photocopies in a binder, and if there are large cuts (often the case with long opera arias) they're much harder to indicate and follow in an opera score. In the past, some NATS chapters skirted this problem by requiring the singer to present legal published copies of the score at their audition but then permitting the pianist to play from photocopies, but this is no longer to be tolerated.

The paradigm that NATS advocates bears no resemblance to what you would see in a professional audition, anyway. It is simply just not realistic for singers to cart full scores of all their repertoire to auditions. Musical theatre performers are expected to have dozens of selections available to choose from in auditions. Opera singers are expected to have five or six arias to present, and they will give a far better audition if they don't have to carry six heavy scores around. 

Right now NATS has no choice but to support copyright law, and my colleagues and our students will abide by their policy. We all need the music publishing industry to flourish.

But listen up, music publishers: If you want to flourish, you're going to have to change your business model eventually. So instead of cracking down on illegal photocopying, I ask you to take a step back and look at how we want your product delivered to us. 

We want to pay you for it. 

We just really need it to be packaged in a more practical way.

Comments

[Brian Lee]

Hear, hear! I agree 100%. Thanks for writing this and I hope you have written to ASCAP and BMI as well!

[Corinne Orde]

Absolutely. Reminds me of what I said in my own blog back in May 2008. http://bonne-chanson.blogspot.com/2008/05/iscores.html Things have changed a little since then, but not all that much!

[Avocationalsinger.blogspot.com]

As an avocational singer, I don't have to face this issue at things like auditions, but I would prefer to use copies of my music to work with in lessons and even at my own piano, for the very reason you state about how flat the music lays. I even would prefer to have copies of my choral music so it fits in my binder better than those little choral editions.

These rules seem very cumbersome to me.

[Claudia Friedlander]

Thanks for directing us to your post, Corinne! Readers, if you agree you should have a look & then follow Corinne's blog as well. Frances, avocational singers are invited to participate in the NATS Student Auditions as well.

[Karl Fogel]

One reason publishers don't do a better job of supplying scores in useable formats (thus forcing us to photocopy to produce playable copies) is that they are monopolies.

We're not used to thinking of it this way, but that's what a copyright is: it's a monopoly on a particular piece of music, or on an edition of a piece of music. No other publisher can publish that exact thing -- which means there is no competition. Unresponsiveness to market pressure is classic monopoly behavior, and it's no surprise to see it happening here.

Try http://questioncopyright.org/ if you're interested in reading a skeptical point of view on the usefulness of copyright in the Internet age. http://questioncopyright.org/promise is a good place to start. (I work with that group and am also a vocal accompanist. I always make photocopied "long book" versions of my scores -- there's no other way. It's not like we all have page-turners available at every rehearsal and performance!)