My Legacy Project

 One benefit of the pandemic universe we have been living in is how it has brought our lives into focus by the reality of death — and for me, this has led to what I think of as My Legacy Project. What do I need to do to give my music (recordings, compositions) the support & structure they need so that when I’m gone they can continue to have life and provide joy to listeners and players? Kind of like launching children into their lives as adult, how best to do this for my music, but also encompassing how to make it easy for the executor of my estate to manage it all when I’m gone, and also including how can I have the most fun with it all while I’m still here?

Tim Reppert has a huge role in this revival of my musical “ambition” — he is such a fan of the music we created together in Water Bear! And his interest in coming to Ithaca (from Boston) to have playing reunions really re-ignited my sense of what might be possible, even though I’ve got finger issues and neck issues that hamper my tolerance for actually playing the violin. 

But I continue to be drawn to music, composing, and playing, and the idea of HOW to promote took hold. 

And I saw through the minimal royalty payments I received via CDBaby that our recording of “Bill” was being listened to on a daily basis. This turned out to be because of Crucial Music’s placement of that piece in the SyFy show The Magicians, and on Spotify a playlist of music from that show getting created and achieving a little popularity. Amazing. 

So that lead to discovering how radically the terrain of the online world of music had changed while I wasn’t paying attention, mostly through checking out how Water Bear music shows up online. The various services that CDBaby had sent our music to: Pandora, Apple, Amazon, Spotify, etc., had all grown features and collaborations that didn’t exist in 2002, of course, duh! 

For one thing, another band called Water Bear (rock) had released music that was now grouped with our releases on these services! 

And then I discovered that the Music Modernization Act had created a new entity, the Mechanical Licensing Collective (theMLC.com) which as of January 2021 has taken over paying out royalties for blanket licenses that many of the Digital Service Providers (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) have now obtained through them. It is a rocky road of transition, from what I can see so far!

So I’ve spent a portion of my musical week on working towards straightening out all of the irregularities that have crept into Water Bear’s online presence. Like claiming official artist pages, trying to get that other band off our artist page, editing entries in ASCAP to reflect the correct composer percentages on the songs that were co-written (this process changed also when I wasn’t looking!), and writing emails and calling the various services to try to understand what the heck is happening now, and what I need to do!

Pandora was giving me a message that the rights to many of my pieces were not cleared, and that I needed to clear them all with MusicReports. So after preparing spreadsheets and uploading them and working with MusicReports to make sure all is well, I believe Pandora is more straightened out. Then, come to find out, in a lovely conversation with the royalty coordinator at MusicReports, they are no longer in charge of any of the blanket license Pandora money, that has been taken over by The MLC. Gah! Instead, they are focused on Karaoke, Peloton, and TikTok. Well I love the image of people working out on their Peloton machines with Water Bear pieces synced to whatever the Peloton visual is, helping to inspire their session. Hah! But perhaps I’ll sign up for it, and see what happens. Now, Karaoke won’t work, will it? With our instrumental pieces? And TikTok I think opens the way for people to set any visuals they want to our music. Would they even want to?

Okay that reminds me I haven’t written about how Tim Reppert has gone to town creating YouTube videos, so far he has done 13 pieces, and they are gorgeous! Here’s the link to our page on YouTube

https://youtube.com/channel/UC99SNW4jjMdFPyIzvyhJvCQ

So — back to “paperwork”. Yesterday I started preparing spreadsheets for The MLC. All songwriters/publishers who self-administer will need to do this, from what I understand. Or sign up for the administration service through CDBaby or someone else! I’m just barely understanding all of this, by the way.

Wish me luck!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Actually opened Sibelius today

Image
I'm still hoping for a composing slot in my day soon, and to whet my appetite and appease it a bit all in the same step, I opened up Sibelius and my Water Flows round, which I recently re-wrote in 5 beats per measure.  It has four parts, and to sing along with it I select the first three parts to play, leaving me to sing the 4th part.  This is a good strategy to check out the reality of trying to sing it, from various vantage points, still being one person with one voice (haven't mastered the tuvan harmonic throat singing totally yet). Just in case you need help looking at the format of this round, each singer (total of 4 needed) enters at the beginning when the preceding singer reaches the second line, which starts with a quarter-note rest then "runs deep..."  So yes obviously someone has to start!  :)  The two measure ending doesn't make alot of sense in this format, sorry!  It is to be harmonized by all 4 voices, what appears here is only one part....
Read more

Am I a Composer?

So this morning I realized that I LOVE putting "Composer" as my occupation on the numerous Customs forms I fill out when visiting Tortola, BVI. I write it in, even when weeks might pass in between composing activities (other than thinking, does that count?). Or maybe the short session I had with my niece Emily in her parents' room at the rental villa counts, where we looked at and listened to several rounds she has been composing; this was spurred by my own project writing rounds apparently, including trying to write rounds in Medieval Modes like Lydian. She was trying a particularly thorny mode with a half step as its first interval, and 2 major thirds in odd places, a middle-eastern scale of some sort most probably. It was great fun to see how she was going about the process of working on rounds. They require lots of creative problem-solving which is a blast, basically. Changing a note early on in the round has ramifications later on as you can imagine, but hearin...
Read more

Light in Winter performance video!

Amazingly enough, I found the DVD that contained the video for Water Bear’s Light in Winter performance, and Tim Reppert, my hero, was able to edit it and mix the sound, and now it is up on our YouTube channel. This is the only significant footage that exists of any Water Bear line-up, and it pleases me no end to have it resurrected. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSrdkE0TZt_O_Id2r8wcY5vSt9xD9-Uoo We collaborated with the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, whose book “Evolution for Everyone: “ I read and absorbed. Then I developed Name Music pieces that could bring to life three concepts from the book: Individual differences, social control, and expanding the circle of cooperation. In between our pieces, David gave two talks on the state of evolution and its application to daily life. David says in the talkback section at the end, that the dress rehearsal where he got to hear what we had prepared was a revelation to him, and led to him adjusting his talk to complement t...
Read more