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The Jesus and Mary Chain founders Jim Reid and William Reid are suing Warner Music Group to reclaim the rights to their 1985 debut studio album, Psychocandy.
The iconic alternative rock band alleges copyright infringement for refusing to terminate grants of copyright interests to the album and its associated singles as allowed under the 1976 Copyright Act, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in California on Monday (June 14).
In the lawsuit, the Scottish band — which shot to indie stardom following the release of Psychocandy and tracks such as “Just Like Honey,” “Never Understand” and “You Trip Me Up” — invoke the 1976 Copyright Act, which allows artists to reclaim their rights to recordings created in 1978 or later after 35 years, provided they submit the correct paperwork ahead of time.
The Reids are seeking all of WMG’s “gains and profits” attributable to the infringement in an amount to be proven at trial or $2.55 million in statutory damages representing $150,000 for each of the 17 registered works they claim are being infringed. In addition, they’re asking for damages for all sound recordings infringed “up to an[d] including the date of trial”; a court declaration that WMG’s retention of these copyrights violates the Copyright Act of 1976; “an accounting of all gains, profits and advantages derived from WMG’s acts of infringement and other violations of law”; and costs of the suit, including attorney’s fees.
The 12-page complaint includes the notice of termination served to WMG on Jan. 7, 2019, two years prior to Psychocandy’s effective date of termination on Jan. 8, 2021. Also included is the Dec. 9, 2020 letter they received from Melissa Battino, vp business affairs at WMG-owned Rhino Entertainment Group, in which Battino stated the notice was “not effective to terminate WMG’s U.S. rights,” arguing that the band “never owned any copyrights in the recordings” according to copyright law in their native U.K. She additionally wrote that serving the termination notice could amount to a “breach” of the band’s original recording contract.
Battino’s letter went on to state the termination matter was subject to the discretion of the British courts, citing the so-called “Duran Duran” decision of 2016, in which the ’80s new wave stars lost their bid to terminate Sony Music’s publishing copyrights over some of their most popular hits. In his decision, Judge Richard Arnold on the UK High Court of Justice ruled that termination notices filed by the band were “voided” because those publishing agreements were subject solely to British law, which has a copyright term of the life of the artist plus 70 years.
But Evan Cohen, the attorney representing The Jesus and Mary Chain in the current case, argues that WMG’s position on the U.K. issue conflicts precedent set by artists who have successfully filed termination notices. “I don’t think it has to do with this British law position, because other British artists have gotten their masters back,” he says, citing Gang of Four as an example of a British act that has successfully terminated WMG’s copyrights over their work.
“Basically what it comes down to is Warner Music is taking the position that British law controls what happens with our termination law,” Cohen adds, “which has never been the case.”
The Jesus and Mary Chain isn’t the first artist Cohen has represented on the issue of copyright termination. In Feb. 2019, the attorney filed a similar lawsuit against both UMG and Sony Music on behalf of a group of artists including John Waite, Joe Ely, David Johansen, John Lyon and Paul Collins (Waite and Ely sued UMG, while Johansen, Lyon and Collins sued Sony Music), whose termination notices were ignored by their respective record companies. (Those cases are still pending.)
In that complaint, Cohen argued that record companies have been hiding behind a clause in the Copyright Act that excepts anyone who creates “works made for hire” — i.e. works created by an employee in the scope of their employment — from the right to file termination notices. In the past, artists have fought back against the common interpretation by record labels that sound recordings should be counted as works-for-hire, including the Eagles frontman Don Henley, who led an effort to strike back at a provision contained in a 1,740-page bill that declared them as such in the late 1990s. But while that effort ultimately led Congress to re-word the provision in question, the issue remains a legal grey area.
Among them is anyone who created “works made for hire,” essentially a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment. In such a situation, it’s the employer seen as the statutory author of the work. The newest lawsuits state that UMG and Sony are regularly taking the position in response to termination notices that recordings are “works made for hire” because of contractual language in recording agreements.
WMG has traditionally “not been as militantly against reversions” as the two other major label groups, says Cohen, though it has still been targeted by such lawsuits in the past. In February of this year, country singer Dwight Yoakam sued the company for refusing to hand back the rights to his early recordings.
“Warner Music has really only taken this position, I would say, five or six times in the past five years, and the rest…they let it go without really saying anything about it,” says Cohen, stating that Los Angeles rock icons X are one WMG act that has successfully terminated the company’s copyrights over their work.
In defiance of WMG’s refusal of their first termination notice, The Jesus and Mary Chain have since filed two others — one for works released between 1987 and 1992 (which have an effective date of termination no later than 2025) and another for two additional recordings put out in 1984 (with an effective date of termination of June 10, 2023). Through the new lawsuit, it seems they are hoping to strike a broader blow against the major record labels in favor of artists’ rights to reclaim their old copyrights.
“Unless enjoined from engaging in like behavior in the future, WMG will be allowed to destroy the value and salability of the subject sound recordings, in direct contradiction of the second change guaranteed by the Copyright Act,” the complaint concludes.
Warner Music Group did not respond to Billboard’s request for comment by the time of publishing.
Warner Bros.’ adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical In the Heights has been promoted as a long-overdue corrective to the underrepresentation of Latinos in Hollywood, yet during the film’s opening weekend, discussion trended online over the movie’s failure to accurately represent its namesake neighborhood’s Afro-Latino population.
On Monday afternoon (June 14), Miranda responded to the criticism. “I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy,” he wrote in a message posted to Twitter. “I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it, and I’m listening.”
Read Miranda’s full message below.
I started writing In the Heights because I didn’t feel seen.
And over the past 20 years all I wanted was for us – ALL of us – to feel seen.
I’m seeing the discussion around Afro-Latino representation in our film this weekend and it is clear that many in our dark-skinned Afro-Latino community don’t feel sufficiently represented within it, particularly among the leading roles.
I can hear the hurt and frustration over colorism, of feeling still unseen in the feedback.
I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy.
In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short.
I’m truly sorry.
I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it, and I’m listening.
I’m trying to hold space for both the incredible pride in the movie we made and be accountable for our shortcomings.
Thanks for your honest feedback. I promise to do better in my future projects, and I’m dedicated to the learning and evolving we all have to do to make sure we are honoring our diverse and vibrant community.
Siempre, LMM
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
If you’re reading this, it’s because you’re a major Drake fan who can’t wait for 6 God’s sixth album Certified Lover Boy to finally drop this summer like he said it would. But which one of his previous projects is your all-time favorite?
Drake, who was crowned Artist of the Decade at the 2021 Billboard Music Awards in May, earned nine Billboard 200 No. 1s in the 2010s, first leading with his debut 2010 studio LP, Thank Me Later, and most recently reigning with 2019’s Care Package. Those chart-topping projects include LPs, EPs, mixtapes and compilation albums. (Scary Hours and Scary Hours 2 did not count toward the Billboard 200 because projects need to contain at least four songs to be considered for chart performance.)
What a Time to Be Alive in 2015 when Drake linked up with Future on their collaborative mixtape. But Nothing Was the Same in 2013 when the OVO MC dropped his introspective ballad-heavy project. His sonically dark 2011 album Take Care won Drake his first-ever Grammy Award in 2013 for best rap album.
We’ll thank him later when CLB is finally out this summer, but which Drizzy project are you forever grateful for? Vote!
In the 2010s, Lil Dicky came up as a comedic Internet rapper — which is also the premise of his hit FXX series Dave — but there’s one viral piece of his story he’s not proud of.
The 33-year-old rapper acknowledges parts of his controversial past in a new feature with GQ published on Monday (June 14), explaining why he took the music video for 2013’s “White Dude” off his official YouTube channel. The video faced backlash for its depictions of Dicky, the titular white dude, galavanting through life much easier than people of color and women.
“Even though I knew I was never serious with it and it was just a joke, it just didn’t feel like a joke I was proud of. And I don’t like making jokes I’m not proud of,” he said, later adding how aware he is of “how insensitive my art can be, but I’m a very sensitive person and I hate offending people. If I see anybody that’s offended by something I’m doing, it really hurts my heart, truly.”
Another decision he’s standing by is recording his 2018 smash hit “Freaky Friday” with Chris Brown, where the two switch bodies (à la the movie it shares a name with) and the R&B superstar enjoys a more low-key life while the rapper spoils himself in Brown’s luxury and ability to say the N-word, which is actually sung by Brown in the song and video. The song peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, which proves Dicky’s point that “Freaky Friday” is a “f—ing global smash hit” despite his collaborator’s own controversial past with domestic violence against women, most notably his ex-girlfriend Rihanna, whom he assaulted in 2009.
“With Chris Brown, we can do one of two things: We can never hear from him again and say ‘I won’t accept any Chris Brown whatsoever,’ or I feel like we can allow him to use his talent for good,” he says. “When I see people react to the song, I really think that it makes people laugh and it makes people happy. I don’t think it’s the type of thing that really is making the world a worse place, on a micro-specific, talking-about-the-song level.”
Read his entire GQ feature here.
J-pop hitmaker Kenshi Yonezu’s most recent album STRAY SHEEP, released in August 2020, became a landmark album for the Japanese music scene, ruling 46 different year-end rankings including the Billboard Japan Hot Albums of the Year 2020 chart. The hit-filled set also left its mark globally as well, becoming the highest-ranking album by a Japanese artist on IFPI’s Global Album All Format Chart 2020, coming in at No. 7 on the tally from the organization that represents the recorded music industry worldwide.
The 30-year-old artist’s first single since the release of his best-selling project is “Pale Blue,” the theme song for the ongoing drama series Rikokatsu, starring Keiko Kitagawa and Eita Nagayama. The highly anticipated CD single will also include the theme of the nightly news program News Zero called “Yumeutsutsu,” and a new track called “Shinigami.” Fans will be able to choose from three types of packages — the puzzle, ribbon, and normal versions — and the DVD included in the ribbon version will feature his groundbreaking virtual live performance on Fortnite from last August.
Yonezu shared the process of writing the songs on his latest single and more in this latest interview with music journalist Tomonori Shiba for Billboard Japan.
What was going through your mind when you began writing “Pale Blue”?
I’d been interested in writing a love song again since before I was working on my album STRAY SHEEP. I wanted to create one that has strength as a pop song. To elaborate… I think music, as compared to other forms of art, has a tendency to foster a kind of narcissism in a broad sense. Music is inherently like that, so the strongest type of pop song is a love song in my view. As someone who creates pop music, I wanted to see what would happen if I went back and tried writing one in a straightforward way. So this was something that I’d been thinking about for a pretty long time, and when I received the offer to write a song for Rikokatsu, I thought it was a good opportunity to go ahead with it.
So by that reasoning, there are no “straightforward” love songs on STRAY SHEEP?
When I released that comment, I’d felt like I hadn’t written a love song for about 10 years. Maybe it’s just that I’ve forgotten, but at this point in time, I can’t really recall writing anything while asking myself things like, “Just what is a love song?” It might even be that I’ve never written a love song in a sincere way like that. So I kept thinking about what the result would be if I tried to do that now.
How did you decide on its theme from there?
Rikokatsu depicts romantic relationships that begin from divorce. While divorce is a parting of ways, some romances start from that point, and that ambiguity sounded interesting to me. So my initial idea was to make it so that it could sound like a song about a budding romance, and also about saying good-bye. And then I spent a really long time thinking about “just what is a romantic relationship?” based on that idea. “Pale Blue” happened to be the most challenging song I’ve ever written in my career in music.
Challenging in what way?
I scrapped about three songs before I finally made it to “Pale Blue.” It wasn’t like anyone told me that they weren’t good or anything, but I just couldn’t be satisfied with them.
There were a few that were kind of different in taste before I wrote this one, but they didn’t feel straightforward enough as love songs in my view. So I went on to try this and that before ending up with “Pale Blue.”
As I mentioned before, music has an effect of fostering narcissism and sentimentalism. Romance ties in deeply with that. Which meant that I had to make something that properly followed through in that direction or else it wouldn’t be consistent with my view. So I figured I should make something sappy to the point of being vulgar in a sense. That’s how the song turned out like this.
You wrote “Yumeutsutsu” for Nippon Television Network’s nightly news program News Zero. When were you asked to make it, and what was the jumping-off point for the track?
When was it? Last August, but feels like such a long time ago now. It was for a news program, which means there’s no clear-cut story or anything, and if there were stories to speak of, they’d be the events or incidents that happened that day. In other words, daily life, right? The daily lives of everyone in Japan right now. And it goes without saying that last year was when everyone in the world had to re-evaluate their daily lives because of COVID-19. As someone who makes music, it felt like an excellent opportunity to take a deeper look at such things once again to create something.
What can you tell us about the sound and arrangement? The chords and melody of “Yumeutsutsu” feel strongly influenced by modern jazz, and the track has a kind of pleasing groove to it.
Those were based on my interests. I was experimenting, trying to do something that I’d never done before, to step out from the comfort zone of pop music that I’d believed in until then.
I’ve always been a fan of rock bands, so my favorite songs are ones that are simply structured. But as I began to get bored with that, I wrote this song while searching for ways to expand upon that within myself. That’s what that sound is all about.
What motif did you have in mind when you wrote “Shinigami”?
“Shinigami” (“The Reaper”) comes from a rakugo story [rakugo is the traditional Japanese art of comic storytelling].
When I was working on “Pale Blue,” I thought I might actually drop dead. I kept thinking stuff like, “I’ll miss the deadline and there won’t be a theme song and I’ll cause trouble for people, this is bad,” moaning while making music. But I did manage to complete it on time and was so relieved. “Shinigami” was a song I started working on after that, thinking that I’d only do stuff that I really enjoy.
I’ve always loved rakugo, and there’s a story called “Shinigami.” There’s a memorable phrase in the work that goes, “ajarakamokuren tekerettsu no paa,” like a spell to chase away the Reaper. Depending on who tells the story, there might be various other gibberish between “ajarakamokuren” and “tekerettsu no paa,” but I just really love the sound of this phrase. I thought it might be fun to set it to music. I went on to produce it in a casual way, and this is how it turned out.
Could you tell us about the virtual concert you performed last August entitled “Kenshi Yonezu 2020 Event / STRAY SHEEP in FORTNITE”? How was that experience for you looking back?
That was great. It was a good experience. It was something new in the sense that it was a live show that could be staged under the current circumstances of this age. I hope that the format becomes more polished and widespread and deeply rooted from now on.
I used to love online games when I was a kid. You can meet different people in an anonymous environment. You meet people whose faces or voices or personalities you don’t know, who exist on the opposite shore. That kind of freedom really saved me because I felt really confined within my environment and my body as a child.
And now we can use virtual bodies — avatars — and gather in a virtual space to enjoy a concert. We live in really good times. I was fortunate to have been able to do something like that on such a large scale. It was a really satisfying experience.
Your album STRAY SHEEP came in at No. 7 on IFPI’s annual global album ranking in 2020, joining the ranks of superstars such as BTS and The Weeknd. This indicates the globalization of the way music is consumed. How do you feel about this?
Personally, I don’t think it’s as big a deal as the numbers suggest. I suppose it’s an accomplishment in terms of annual sales for last year, but still, I don’t think I stand alongside BTS and The Weeknd within the global framework at all.
At the end of the day, what I’m doing is J-pop, nothing more or less. That’s not to say that I won’t make something geared towards an audience outside of Japan in the future, but I do feel that I want to basically keep my focus on J-pop. Having said that, though, I think there are things that I could do [on a global level], so I admit I’m curious as to see how things turn out if I give them a try.
Additionally, the animated tour-de-force from Japan’s STUDIO4°C CHILDREN OF THE SEA returns to select theaters in the U.S. on June 13 & 15. The film features Yonezu’s stirring theme song, “Spirits of the Sea.”
