Absolutely it’s enough. But what if I told you that with a devotion of 2 hours a week on the business side of your music business, you could generate another $200,000 per year. Would you do it? Now I don’t actually have a magic bullet like that, but what if for an extra 4 hours a week you could generate another $10,000 of your music; would you do it?

See what I’m getting at? You are absolutely right that it IS chaos right now to keep track of so many elements to maximize sales revenue of audio products.

I think the answer lies partly in maximizing audio delivery methods but also in exploiting your own copyrights.

For me personally, I know it is almost a full-time job right now getting all of my publishing, copyrights, PRO registrations, etc. all in order. I have let it slide for many years and just rode a wave of telling myself that my royalty income “is enough” and I’m “doing good,” What I am realizing in the last year is there are many more opportunities out there for us if we are tenacious.

Thanks for reminding me that it’s an exciting time. I get intimidated by the chaos. I’ve written a number of songs, a couple of which people often say that I should sell. That would be nice. I’m not sure how. I can hardly sell CDs (yes, I know, outmoded music delivery systems) but I’m getting a few bucks from Spotify.
I’d like to just write more songs, book my band and play. Isn’t that enough!?!

In general, I seem to side on the corporate or legalistic side of things when it comes to copyright, music business and music contracts.

So I think there’s a vagueness that’s an issue. You say “use my work for free in the spirit of sharing what was given by the Creator”; which I think is not an uncommon viewpoint from a writer perspective. First thought is regardless of that, there is a bundle of copyright rights for the writer attached to that work. Although the “gift from the creator” viewpoint is noble and resonates with artists, it’s the copyright bundle that is going to generate income for your business expenses, which you mention in the next sentence.

The way we have found to support our creative artists is in endowing this copyright bundle of rights to the creator; and I mean “small c” creator, the writer of the work. One of those rights is the right to derivative works.

I also love satire and have so many projects I would like to create for parody, but I only do satire and parody on public domain works because I don’t want to deal with the legal issues. My public domain parody work has generated a steady income stream for many years and it is very aggravating when I know that this income stream would be much, much more if I applied this same technique to modern music still under copyright.

Truth be told, the reason those parodies would generate more income with modern music still under copyright is that it has more traction with the public in the current place and time. In other words, there is more value in those copyrights. So the truth is that I would be piggy-backing off of someone else’s work to create my income. This is derivative. But if I don’t have the proper permission then all that work can backfire on me. Mechanical licenses do not cover parodies directly. Parody is technically covered by direct permission, or without permission you try to fly under the “fair use” clause which doesn’t always stick in the use of parodies.

In the original YouTube cases above, I looked at those as part of a group study exercise. In our group I was the only one to side on the “corporate side”. Most people felt that the public should be able to use these clips freely for non-income and non-professional purposes.