Vh1 beat stealers

I guess mtv was running out of songs for commercials and such. Instead of paying for them they decided to trick people into giving them new songs. Most people dont read the fine print. Some people probably dont care. I personally would not want flava flav on any beat I made. How old is that dude like 50?

Yeah, you still fully own the track. It looks like what happened is you licensed the track to MTVN exclusively. This means you can't license that track to anyone else now. Since you still own the track you should receive performance royalties as the author everytime it's played on tv, radio, movie, or performed live. That's what licensing is. You still own it, but they licensed it from you and get to use it as long as they abide by the terms set by the contract.

There is also non-exclusive licensing. If you did that you could still license the same track to other clients... Then you could have many people using the same track and you get payment for all of it. Still though, many people would rather license something exclusively to MTV than non-exclusive to other smaller gigs. MTV is a big name bro, and they have to pay you for it's use... Unless you agreed to no performance royalties...

Are you a member of a Performance Rights Organization? There are three in USA and they are the people who collect your performance royalties and send you the check. If you're in the US, the three PROs are BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC. Sign up with one if you haven't already.

Makes sense. Almost every show on mtv has background instrumentals randomly throughout. Wouldn't be suprised if peoples songs pop up all over those, jingles for commercials and if its good enough on mainstream rap albums. At least youll be able to say your song got played on mtv. I doubt the royalties youd get would be very much if any at all. maybe another possible avenue to get noticed but most likely just a huge ripoff.

You might be right Matt. I'd assume MTV goes through tens of thousands of different recordings in their broadcasts and such, I doubt they have to pay licensing fees and royalties for all of them... Especially the one's submitted by home producers directly to MTV, ie no PRO and no publisher involved.

However, by default you would still recieve your royalties because while MTVN retains the "rights," you still retain the ownership. As the owner you should be entitled to mechanical and performance royalties, unless the contract specifies that if you sign it you agree to forfeit your royalties.

I've never entered into anything like this, so I don't know what exactly the contract says, but I'm assuming that there's more to it than what you posted... Anything's possible when a contract is involved because there are absolutely no rules to the extremity of its terms, they just have to be written down. If you both sign the contract, what it says, goes... like law...

lol, probably.

Eh, don't sweat it. Was it just one song? No big deal, you can make more!

A balance. Well spoken.

no clue if the agreement can be terminated or not. I've gotten over my ranting i suppose :) but still think its rather shady of such a big company to go after the unknown producers in such a fashion. The "I have millions and dont want to spend any of it" attitude by big companys these days is sickening. I mean, if they wanted to keep your beat or whatever, whats the damage to them to pay an unknown producer $100 (the normal beginning price for an unknown producers beats) instead of trying to gaffle folks?