Well it arrived at last, the summer that is! Timely as I had already borrowed a snippet from the legend that is Roy Ayers. As he said, “Everybody Loves the Sunshine”! He called his band Roy Ayers Ubiquity when he released that album in 1976. Ubiquity seemed very appropriate over here in the UK that year with a summer that went on and on. (BTW this was the last time I swam in a British sea. The sun was warm but not the water!)
What is also certainly true is that the challenges of early creators and those trying to get their projects working are indeed ubiquitous! OK enough of the wordplay, what are we talking about today?
I thought with the sunshine, a new government in the UK, and perhaps some hope for the future from our damaged economy, we could look at how we accelerate any growth by building tools that better match the various challenges of the new talent.
Now our focus has been on music as you know. It is ridiculously hard, as we have established before, to get music developed, marketed, and heard without a big wallet. Our Springer RevShare deals have been opening up opportunities for professionals to work with new artists on a financially equitable basis while securing their future earnings. The use of our technology platform has aided this process.
What is concerning me at the moment is how we refine this service to provide an even more substantive product to match an even wider market while keeping the cost down to an absolute minimum. More of this in weeks to come.
At the root of the costs of legal work is often the complexity attributed to the deals themselves but a key part can often be the more confrontational approach of many to get a contract agreed the way they want. I have spent hours in the offices of lawyers where the game seems to be to get one over the other rather than reaching an equitable position for all parties. Time would have been better spent on the actual activity that the contracts related to.
So how practical is it to limit/remove the scope for gamesmanship, machiavellian dark arts, and general showboating in generating reliable agreements to meet the demands of all? Well, it is very achievable for what I describe as entry-level agreements which look to establish key facts, obligations, and parties to the agreements in a commercial deal. Definitions do not need to be fought over, remedies to breach can be in a standard accepted form, etc.
What is most important is for the intent of the agreement to be fairly represented and that one side should not lose out if a lawyer has missed something that was left in the agreement in the hope that it might slip through. Tedious to be honest and frankly unhelpful. The best lawyers I have ever worked with have sought to draft agreements with both parties in mind. These have produced agreements that are in agreed form with days not months.
Of course, I am not naive to expect there not to be breaches to any agreements but if the facts are clear and the basis upon which the obligations were undertaken easy to understand, then remedy can also be much easier to reach than within more complex agreements. I repeat this approach is for more entry-level law. We are not negotiating a new agreement to re-enter Europe – more’s the pity!
You would not expect me not to take the opportunity to remind artists/creators that if at all possible keep hold of their copyright and simply share defined revenues at an agreed rate for a set period. Not only does this make total sense for you as an artist but also makes for far easier agreements
I am sure there will be some from the legal profession who will say the transfer of a significant part of the legal work to technology based on this approach is at best seen as alternative hippy thoughts to be seen as metaphorical Bees and Flowers and Things. They would be wrong, this is the future and I can confidently predict that a substantial part of this area of legal services will be fulfilled by the likes of Springer within a very few years
That’s all until the next time when we dig a bit deeper into how all of this can be Stoking The Starmaker Machinery.
