Local entertainment law students at Florida Coastal School of Law recently listened to the needs of music recording artists during a panel discussion titled “Fame & Fortune: A Multi-Platinum View of Music Contracts.”
The panel included local musicians that have achieved both national and international success in the music industry, including Bobby Ingram of Molly Hatchet; Paul Phillips, most recently of Puddle of Mudd; Curt Towne of the Van Zant Band; and Ronnie Winter of Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.
The musicians were asked to describe their first experiences with the law in signing their first contracts.
Phillips
Paul Phillips discussed the problems caused when business and friendship intertwine. He had participated in many bands in Jacksonville but few were noteworthy until he started a band called “Happy Hour,” which was a punk/ska band.
“We started selling out the places that we played and believing that we were rock stars. With that success came a meeting with Fred Durst (lead singer for Limp Bizkit).
“He took interest in my band, and Limp Bizkit was blowing up at the time and he wanted to sign my band,” said Phillips.
Phillips was ready to chase his dream of being a rock star.
“I was in college at UNF, going for management and marketing. I instantly dropped out of college and thought I was going to be an instant millionaire overnight, but that doesn’t happen. We waited and we waited and we waited and we didn’t have an attorney because we were on the friendship thing,” said Phillips.
“’We’re all bros and we are going to go on tour together and I’ll take care of you,’” he said Durst told him.
“We sit around five months, seven months and we finally get the contract eight months later. It was an advance of about $4,000 and we were a ska band, so we had eight people. Do the math. We weren’t eating well,” said Phillips.
While he was ready to invest himself in the music industry, it was harder to convince some of his bandmates.
“We had some guys working at Publix and other guys were doing other things and they had mortgages. They were like, ‘why am I going to go out and eat canned tuna and sleep in a sleeping bag when I own a home and I make money?’ So it basically broke up my band because nobody could afford to do it. I was all for it because I was young, but it was my first experience with the sense that nobody is really ‘bros’ when business is involved. You can be friends, but at the end of the day, everyone is going to take care of themselves.
“So that is why we need people like (lawyers) to look after those contracts, which isn’t what we did,” said Phillips.
Winter
Ronnie Winter’s story was a similar tale.
“We had a pretty unfortunate beginning because when you are a local band and you are doing it on your own, people really don’t find out about you right away. It has to happen slowly over time,” said Winter.
“We didn’t have management or a lawyer when we started playing, just kind of going with the flow and hoping people liked the music,” he said.
He also didn’t have money for recording-studio time.
“We were like ‘Hey, we’re broke, we’re from Middleburg, but we are really good, so we will just give you everything we have if you just let us make payments.’ That ended up turning into a completely different scenario, so this is where you really wish you had an entertainment lawyer. The same ‘bro’ thing happens. He brings us to his house. He’s got this really, really nice big house,” said Winter
The recording studio owner offered to sign the band to his own label and presented Winter a contract.
“He said, ‘why don’t I just sign you guys to me and I just so happen to already have a contract.’ We were all thinking, ‘he brought us over here to get us to sign the contract.’ But it’s all so unbelievably exciting and when you are living in a trailer in Middleburg and you’re looking at this house and this contract, you are going to do what your heart tells you to do. And our heart told us to sign it,” said Winter.
He saw that being able to make music his job was a step in the right direction.
“As long as you are making music for a living, you are going to be happy no matter what happens,” said Winter.
Winter had a different view of that statement after signing the contract.
“Long story short, we started to become successful over the years. Nothing happened right away. Nothing does. It takes a long, long time. About a year and a half later we starting getting attention from major labels and getting flown out to places like New York and L.A. The whole ride was pretty cool,” said Winter.
That ride would have come to a quick end if the band didn’t make some changes.
“We kept running into this same problem. We had this contract that had been sitting around for two years that was terrible. It locked us into all these crazy agreements that nobody would have ever signed had we known or had proper representation, because it was ridiculous,” said Winter.
The band hired an entertainment lawyer and the lawyer was able to remove the band from the contract. That allowed it to sign a record deal with Virgin Records.
“It almost didn’t happen because he had us in a vice grip. Had we not had Matt Greenberg, I don’t think we would have ever signed this guy’s crazy demands. It sucks to be in a situation where you can see your future taking off and there is this one guy, due to greed and manipulation, holding you back,” said Winter.
Towne
Panelist Curt Towne took it upon himself to read up on entertainment law when record deals started to be offered to him.
“I started reading this book by (entertainment lawyer) Donald Passman, and so I start reading all this stuff as we started looking at these contracts. We didn’t know any entertainment lawyers. We had no clue. The only one I knew was Passman,” said Towne.
“I would start reading these contracts and I would say, ‘Wait a minute. What do you mean that I don’t get anything and you own everything?’ Ultimately, we didn’t get signed because I knew too much,” said Towne.
Towne, a songwriter, was reluctant to sign away his rights on any contract.
“We went through a lot of those situations. Ultimately, it boiled down to I was a songwriter just by default. I would just write songs. I wouldn’t sign everything away. It may have been a foolish thing, but I talked to Kerry Livgren in Nashville. He’s a guy that wrote ‘Dust in the Wind,’ ‘Carry On Wayward Son,’ all those things with Kansas,” said Towne.
When Livgren was asked about his new album and what record label he was signed with, Livgren explained that he was releasing records on his own without any record label.
He said he made more money selling 6,000 records on his own than he did with any of his time with Kansas, with “Dust in the Wind” alone being certified by the Record Industry Association of America as a gold single, selling one million copies. It was certified as a digital gold selling single in 2005.
“So, as an entertainment lawyer, if entertainers know that you have a guy or lady out there who has a heart for artists, I guarantee you that you will be sought after. It’s just getting to know that you have our best interest. Honestly, nothing against labels, but it’s the business of entertainment and they are out to make money, period. It doesn’t matter how or who, because there is always somebody next,” said Towne.
Ingram
Bobby Ingram of Molly Hatchet was not only a guest panelist, but he also is a member of Florida Coastal’s Entertainment Law Society and one of the organizers of the event.
The University of North Florida graduate has been auditing classes at the Southside campus, include intellectual property rights and information technology.
“I think everybody’s story is pretty similar. There is definitely a common denominator. When you start out in music, and when your clients come through the door, they are not going to know what to do. They’re not going to know where to go or who to turn to, so they are going to depend on you solely,” said Ingram.
Having representation can help an artist deal with the multiple hands that are taking money out of their pockets, Ingram said.
“They have managers coming after them, they have agents coming after them, publishers coming after them, records coming after them. Everyone wants to take your money and they want to take it and take it all,” he said.
Ingram stressed the pursuit of trademarks.
“I had the opportunity to acquire the trademarks to the group, which I did, and I would recommend to all the attorneys up here to please emphasize the importance of intellectual property to your clients. Tell them to get the trademarks, because if you don’t have that trademark, then other people are going to be able to come in and take pieces of what you are doing,” said Ingram.
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