Using riffs from Beatles A Day in the Life
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Hi folks! I have been a beatles and McCartney fan for as long as I can remember. Right now I am preparing a marketing campaign for a client company and we want to theme it along A Day in the Life of various target customer groups. Having never used published music in a marketing campaign before, I am looking for some guidance. Firstly, how and from whom do I seek permission to use riffs from A Day in the Life? I am sure there are royalties involved. What are the royalties and how and to whom should we pay them? Where should we obtain the music we want in a form that we can extract the desired riffs from. Thank you Phil Allen CEO & Value Creator Customer Value Management GmbH Z?rich, Switzerland. +41 7 9423 1390 -
Well, firstly it might be rather difficult. For video (I'm not certain if this extends to corporate use or if it's only for public broadcast), you need to obtain a sync licence which basically shows what you intend to use, for how long and how many times. This is hard to get and can be easily refused. Within music exists two copyrights, the composition and the sound recording. The song will be owned by Paul McCartney and the estate of John Lennon. The actual version on Sgt. Pepper's is owned by the publisher, in this case EMI. This is the reason most ads will record their own versions of well-known songs. It's a lot cheaper to pay a bunch of sessions musos to play the song you want than to buy the sync licence for the recording. So, if you go down the route of recording new versions of your parts, you're still left with getting the songwriter licence. I have a feeling that Sony owns them now which, given how big they are, might be an issue. But it never hurts to send an email. I've looked on the MPL Communications page (they have a very handy licencing form) and it appears they don't own the majority of Beatles songs but they might be able to point you in the right direction if you get nowhere with Sony.
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Sony/ATV owns the Beatles songs. http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7408723/beatles-lyrics-licensing-sony-atv-epic-rights-deal-lennon-mccartney http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/music-licensing.htm Google is a wonderful tool.
