This is a very ironic thread because 'WKRP in Cincinnati’ is getting a DVD release with its original music
You can order it today from ShoutFactory or anywhere starting on Oct. 28.
Chuck has the legalities correct, but I guess somebody worked out a deal.
Sorry, just read the fine print.
So, most of the music but not all. From comments, apparently the Beatles and Pink Floyd are missing, but I can’t tell how many others. There were over 350 songs on the series and Shout has not provided an authoritative list of which ones are included.
According to David Peck of reelin in the years productions, which does a lot of work in clearing rights, it’s an incredibly difficult process. He uses the example of the Rolling Stones performing “Carol” on the Red Skeleton tv show. His company may control the footage, Chuck Berry controls the publishing, image and likeness is controlled by the five Rolling Stones (including Brian Jones’s estate). If it’s lip-sync that is controlled by the label ABCKO. Since it was on American TV, you probably have the pay the directors guild. This is all in a time when the dvd market is slumping.
You can argue the worst thing that happened for rights clearing was the success of "American Graffiti" in 1973. An unknown director, George Lucas, with a mostly unknown cast, was able to use $100,000 of a $900,000 film budget to get 40 songs 10-15 years old because, hey, nobody cares about that pre-Beatles pap today. Turns out they did, film made lots of money, and lots of times various people hold out, thinking it's a winning powerball ticketOf course the artists were good with it. But they were under contract to recording companies, so the recording companies had to sign off on it too. Which is why George Harrison was credited as “L’Angelo Misterioso” on Cream’s “Goodbye Cream” album and Arlo Guthrie was credited as “Arloff Boguslavaki” on Earl Scrugg’s “I Saw The Light With A Little Help From My Friends” album.
Interesting - I didn’t know that.
Question: did Harrison’s and Guthrie’s use of pseudonyms fulfill their contractual obligations, by their not appearing under their famous (real) names? Or were they still violating their contracts by appearing at all, but evading detection? TIA.
Does anyone have a guess about my earlier post (i.e., music that’s on the DVD release but not on the show’s iTunes version)?
One interesting factor was in the VCR era of the 1980s and 1990s, studio executives didn’t believe old tv shows would sell great numbers of complete season sets. The real popular shows like “I Love Lucy” and “Star Trek” would. But not most the others would. Too expensive, space consuming for people to buy-especially when were used to watching reruns for free. So they didn’t think of doing anything about music rights for a “WKRP” for a home video release. Remember, back then studios tried to stop VCRs and narrowly lost a Supreme Court case, which SONY may have won because they got Mr Rogers to file a friend of the court testimony supporting them
I think you’re underestimating the difficulty of this negotiation, and the importance of getting a “fair” price.
For the musician, the license fees for their work is often how they make their money. They spent a bunch of time and effort crafting a particular song that evokes memories and has a particular emotional impact. It’s not greedy to expect to get paid for that, and “accept any offer of licensing because it’s better than getting nothing” is a pretty terrible negotiating strategy that just about guarantees that you’re not going to make much.
But, even if the musicians and the producers didn’t have a somewhat adversarial relationship here (one trying to pay the least, the other trying to get the most), it’s hard to come up with a fair price for this kind of thing. Is the music fundamental to the scene, or is it just background and can be easily replaced? Is there an alternative (maybe a cover?) that’s pretty good? Is there a lot of music in the show, meaning that each individual song probably gets less, or are there just a few songs, meaning that there are fewer parties to negotiate with, but each one might think they deserve more? That’s really just scraping the surface.
Most people, when they buy a car, spend a few hours negotiating for it. And they’re only dealing with the difference of a few thousand dollars. Negotiating the rights to music for a whole television series could easily result in a difference of millions.
The same thing as the rest of this thread: the march of technology is outpacing licensing agreements. The Sports Night DVDs came out pretty early as far as DVDs go (1998). I bet they negotiated a license for the DVDs but failed to consider streaming.
Note that that isn’t just failure to think ahead. When you don’t know what the future brings, it’s better to just negotiate the deal right now than it is to make some long-term agreement that covers unknown future technology and then discover that you’re locked into a bad deal.
Some contracts have clauses that include any technology that will ever be invented anywhere in the universe. That sounds like a joke but isn’t. Anybody with any clout will strike those clauses from the contract, but the unintended consequence is that when new technologies come along contracts then have to be renegotiated over and over again, with finding the right people to work with harder and harder each time.
It’s a real problem and nobody has come up with a solution.
The music rights are always a step behind. First no one thought to care about Video tapes and DVD so many came out with replacement music (or very expensive sets that factored the effort and cost of the music rights into their price) then streaming rights so you often end up with Netflix using replacement songs that the DVD didn’t have to.
As far as WKRP goes, it seems to me that except for part of the first verse of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” and some of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”, there really weren’t many particular songs that were really important to an episode. Usually, anything that sounded Rockish would have worked. Listen to the song they played for the ending credits.
There was also “Hot Blooded” by Foreigner in “A Date With Jennifer” when Les put on the wig. The new DVD set will have that song restored, as well as the lines from “Tiny Dancer” in the Russian defector episode.
Just a note: MTV’s great animated show *Daria *was prevented from being released on DVD for nearly a decade for this very reason, it used famous tracks as incidental and closing credit music. When it ran on MTV it fell under the blanket rights of MTV being able to play copyrighted songs on all their shows. It finally got released with most all of the music replaced with generic stuff.
Julie Brown (the ‘white’ comedian Julie Brown, not the annoying ‘British’ black VJ) said on Letterman years ago that when she did her comedy show on MTV they said she could have pretty much creative control of the show, but she had to show at least three videos per episode. She could make fun of them, interrupt them, parody them etc. but still had to mostly show them.
Seems odd today, MTV requiring videos being shown! 
That’s something I’m very definitely planning on. I haven’t seen that much of the show, so I’m thinking it’ll be a very good purchase.
I had forgotten “Hot Blooded”. And I did mention “Tiny Dancer” in my post. But other than those 3 songs, then, would it really matter what songs were used, other than Rock and Roll for Johnny’s scenes and Cool Jazz for Venus’s scenes?
Fair enough. The Floyd clip I recall was Johnny Fever playing “Dogs” (a 17 minute long cut, note), and Carlson walks into the studio and chats him up a bit. Fever ID’s the band by name IIRC.
It probably would if Johnny or Venus mentioned the name of the song they were playing. I remember an episode where Herb had to go to court and Andy temporarily took over sales and made Venus program director. Johnny was playing Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” and complained on the air that he was being forced to play it. And he did say, “That was ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ by Queen.” I remember a few other episodes where songs were playing and the DJ announced the title. So those songs would have to match up with the dialogue.
I would disagree that it’s an unintended consequence. It’s an intended consequence, just one that trades efficiency for flexibility. Just like contracts that only last a specified period of time, and then have to be renegotiated.
Yes, it means that you have all the hassles and costs of negotiation again. But it also means that you can fix an agreement that isn’t working without resorting to the courts. Which has much higher hassles and costs.
And since the business models of selling content can change drastically with new technology, it totally makes sense to not negotiate that stuff in advance before anyone really knows what a reasonable agreement will be.
All that’s correct, and is perfectly reasonable for any one contract. My issue lies with the industry as a whole. No mechanism exists for a central registry of who owns what, containing means of contacting owners. It’s very similar to the problem of “orphan books,” books who are still under copyright by owners that can no longer be found. Nobody means to make renegotiation nearly impossible; it’s an artifact of the system.
I agree that orphaned works are a problem, but it seems like that problem is orthogonal to the one this thread is about.
If you negotiated the DVD license 15 years ago, it probably didn’t get harder to track down the owners for the streaming license. It probably got easier, since whoever owned the rights 15 years ago likely still owns them, or at least knows who they sold them to.