Donald Trump the Megathread part II - Mod Warning added to OP 10/1/26

I'd forgotten that, Springsteen sold his entire music rights for more than $500 million to Sony Music Entertainment in late 2021.

Must have been a bad harvest that year.

Not quite.

It works like this.

• The composer of a song owns the performance rights.
• A musician wishing to record the song needs a licence to record the song from the composer
• A political campaign (or supermarket, or dentist's waiting room, or whatever) wishing to play the recording needs a licnce both from the composer and from the performer of the recording they wish to play.

Composers and performers are free to sell their rights to others, in which case if you wish to perform the song, or play a recording of it, you need a licence from whoever it is who has bought the rights.

The rights don't last for ever — they expire after a set number of years, after which you can perform/play to your heart's content.

This would be unworkable, were it not for the fact that rightsholders — composers, performers, people who have bought or inherited rights — typically appoint a performing rights organisation (PRO) to manage their rights for them. So I can go to a PRO and buy a licence to play a large package of musical works, the rights to which belong to clients of the PRO. I pay a single fee for this, which is divvied up between all the rightholders, based on a complex formula that the PRO works out.

So, PROs offer a variety of licences suited to different circumstances. If you're a supermarket and you want to play classic popular music 16 hours a day in all your branches, there's a licence for a package of musical works that will suit you. If you're a dentist who want to play light classical music in your waiting room, there's a different licence. (It will cost much less.) The costs of the licence depend on a number of factors, but mainly (a) the number and nature of the works included in the packagem (b) the size of the audience you will be playing it to and (c) whether your purpose is commercial or not.

A political campaign needs "a political entities licence" which, depending on how much you pay, allows you play works included in the licence package (a) at rallies and meetings, or (b) in ads.

But one of the terms of the agreement by which rightsholders appoint a PRO to manage their rights is usually a clause which allows the rightsholder to withdraw a work from a political entities licence. An artist might withdraw their works from all political entities licences, if they don't want to be seen as political or associated with politics, or they can just withdraw their works from a specific licence to a campaign that they do not support, or do not wish to be seen to support. The artist can do this even after the political entities licence has been granted.

So the Trump campaign might buy a licence to a package of songs including, e.g. Born to Run, but at any point the rightsholders of Born to Run can withdraw their permission for the political campaign to use that particular song and, once the political campaign has been notified of this, they no longer have the right to use Born to Run. They know that this is a possiblity at the time they buy the licence (or, at least, they know it if they bother to read the licence terms before signing and paying).

It can also happen that a political campaign transgresses by using a work in a way that exceeds the terms of their licence (e.g. they have a licence to play it at meetings, but they use it in a television ad) or by using a work which is not included in any licence that they have.

Autism Speaks try to distance themselves from it nowadays but the damage was done. They still support ABA which is basically the autism form of gay conversion therapy, both invented by the same group!

None