Just saw this; this is great! * note: for some reason link doesn't work all the time; others have it re-posted below

[HoopUte]

@salUTE

I haven’t paid attention to his struggle for decades, so it may have changed, but for the longest time, and perhaps still, you would not be dealing with Fogerty if you wanted to use one of this old tunes, but with the owner of the recording company he signed with in the 60’s. The bad deal over ownership was the reason he and Creedence dropped of the face of the earth way before their popularity was gone.

When Fogerty came off his self-imposed exile in the 1980s with his album that had “Centerfield” and “The Old Man Down the Road” on it, there was also a song about the manager that screwed him and the rest of CCR on publishing rights. (That was, and probably is, more common than we know. Refer to what Dick James did to The Beatles and Elton John, for instance.) The song is called, “Zanz Can’t Dance” and includes the lyric, “Zanz can’t dance but he’ll steal your money. Watch him or he’ll rob you blind.” He also called him a pig. Needless to say lawyers also got involved over that.

Copyrights and performance rights are really a complex, and sometimes hard to navigate issue, especially in the era of YouTube, etc. With the church I go to having gone to YT Live feeds of services either outside all summer or now inside with limited seating, we have to be really cautious on this, and you can have a license that’s fine for doing a song as part of a service, but maybe not for having on a YT video.

It’s also amazing how little money per play is actually collected for a YT play of a song that is monetized. I follow a record producer named Rick Beato who does a series of videos called, “What Makes This Song Great,” among other videos on music theory, guitar technique, etc. Infamous “blockers” that have people watching out for videos include The Eagles (via Universal Music Corporation), Led Zepplin, and Pink Floyd. Beato got his video on “Hotel California” blocked by UMC, who has six people full time combing the web for unauthorized use of just Eagles songs. In Beato’s case it’s more probable that his videos are fair use because they are obviously for educational purposes. (I mean, where else are you likely to learn that in Tom Scholz organ solo on “Hitch a Ride” he used a Hammond M3 and got that cool pitch increase at the end of it by putting his hand on the reel-to-reel tape deck to slow the tape down just right? That’s effing amazing!) But I digress. What Beato pointed out in a video rant about The Eagles blocking is that even if all 1 million of his followers watched the “Hotel California” video, the royalties Don Henley would have collected amounts to only $1200. Henley’s net worth is estimated to be about $200million.

[AbsoluteUte]

That’s very interesting and yes, it’s very complex. As an aside, John Fogerty always had a problem with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead (both being being in San Francisco). There’s multiple occasions where he calls them calls them “boring.” It’s fine when it’s a matter of taste, but he has basically spewed on them over 50 years in national interviews that might have best been time-managed for promoting his own obvious talent. As an example, he’s repeatedly blamed the dead for “playing too long at Woodstock” and boring the crowd to sleep" before CCR’s set. However, everyone knows there were multiple delays at Woodstock due to the weather, technical and crowd issues etc…The dead actually played a very abbreviated set in a howling rainstorm, but I guess facts don’t really matter to John, because he seems to have a bitter crook in his craw regarding his brethren San Fran contemporaries, who are still packing football stadiums with well crafted songs and excellent musicianship.

“We ran onstage ready to rock ‘n’ roll, but everybody was just lying there in front of the stage asleep,” Fogerty said. “That’s why I didn’t want it on the record or in the film. I figured at best it wouldn’t help, and at worst it might hurt us for people to see that … They sabotaged our chance in the limelight."
Aug 15, 2019