09/11/2011 – Wednesday
Phew. Tired today. I’ve been trying to figure out some legal stuff. It’s quite complicated, but it’s well worth getting right. Especially in a business like mine, there are always people who will take advantage of any gaps in your legal protection. Take artist contracts for example. Whenever an artist on a small label shows signs of success, larger labels start sniffing around. They want a well-developed artist they can take to the top with the minimum of investment, and naturally the artist wants to further their career. This far too often leaves the smaller label without the artist they have spent time and money developing just as their hard work was about to start paying off. So it’s important to be protected. Not because I want to wield lots of power over all the little people, but because I don’t want to be a doormat myself.
Simon and Garfunkel
In other news, I’m slowly getting somewhere with the amusing songs I was talking about yesterday. It’s been more difficult than I’d hoped, but it’s starting to come together. I once wrote a piece for a Welsh male voice choir to a brief, and I vividly spending three or four days trying to shoehorn an idea into the right mould before I realised it was the wrong idea for the brief. I went back to the drawing board, came up with an idea that fit better, and wrote the whole thing in a few hours. Sometimes it just happens that way.
Oh, here’s one for you. Anyone who is in any way interested in music of any kind should know a bit about Simon and Garfunkel. They were the focus of Alan Yentob’s ‘Imagine’ programme last night. It’s available on iPlayer, so check it out.
