interviews with library music producers - Philip Tagg

32 P Tagg: The Mood Music Libraries
the music log it with the MCPS and depending on the usage of their film —
either to a paying or non-paying audience, overseas, UK only or whatever
— they pay the blanket tariff. You can’t make negotiations about it. It’s the
set fee. But if a producer wanted to use, say, the Elgar Pomp and Circumstance
march he would call us and we would arrange a fee because it’s hot
property and he would have to pay quite a good fee for the usage. So we
only negotiate directly with the user when it comes to things like the Elgar
or Barwick Green.20 The reason we’ve done this is because once we discovered
some advertisers playing the Elgar Pomp and Circumstance march we
had in the catalogue. They were only paying a blanket license. We all
thought this was nonsense because if an advertising agent wants to use a
very well-known piece of music meanly, he’ll have to pay for it — that’s business.
It’s tough world we’re living in. So we withdrew the Elgar from the catalogue,
which means that if anyone wants to use it now they’ll have to ring
our copyright director who will negotiate a fee. Now, the same has been applied
to Barwick Green21 in the last weeks. We’ve withdrawn it from the library
because not only the yoghurt advertisement but also Heinecken Lager
have both used Barwick Green and both basically got it for peanuts.
So it’s a simple matter of supply and demand?
Exactly. To apply for a blanket fee, you have to fill in where your film or
whatever is going to be shown, if it’s a non-paying or paying audience, if you
re asking for a worldwide release, or if it’s just going to be shown within one
country. All these things govern the final cost of the music. I’m sure radio
and TV producers think the cost is too high, but in fact it’s very cheap for
what they’re getting.
How do the sort of blanket fees you’re talking about stand in comparison to
a piece of commercial music on the one hand or to a piece of classical music
on the other?
If you want to use a commercial recording of a Tchaikovsky symphony
you’ve got to get all kinds of permission from the record company. If you
want to use a commercial record by, say, Abba, then you’re in trouble because
both the record company and Abba themselves will want a large slice
of the cake. However, if you want something that sounds like Abba on a library
record (that is if it exists in a library — it doesn’t exist in ours, so perhaps
Abba is a bad example)… Anyhow, if you wanted a disco sound you’d
be very unwise to go to the Saturday Night Fever people because of the cost
of it. If you went to a library (and I’m sure every library has at least one
disco record in it these days), then you’d pay much less and the aggro would
be much less. You just apply to the necessary organisation or, in the case of
the Valentino library, you deal straight with them and things are much easier.
If you go into the commercial world it’s extremely complicated. Very few
people do it.
Do Coca Cola work like that? I mean, they have their advertising jingle competitions…
That’s right. But on the other hand I happen to know that Coca Cola do a lot
of original material. There’s a young American who lives and works in Madrid.
They commission him to do a lot of their music which he records in Ma-
20. Signature to the BBC radio series ‘The Archers’ (‘an everyday story of country folk’), first
broadcast in the 1950s, and whose title tune, Barwick Green, is still the same in 2000!
21. See footnote 20, p. 32.