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Musicians: guess which fish you are? |
Fripp reads the Financial Times and now he's done an interview for them. This may answer your question about whether to enter into music as a career.
Fripp has been in dispute with UMG for some time now.
Here's an excerpt from his diary: "Mr. Most Useless Of Smiths in the UMG Business Affairs Department.
This is the man who famously made the comment to Declan Panegyric: You cannot expect a company the size of UMG to read or apply the details of every contract of every catalogue it acquires.
Err. Um. Well. Alright. Actually, very much not - alright.
So, UMG accepts liability for those details in any contract it didn’t read, didn’t honour?
Err. Um. Well. No. Rather than acknowledging error and addressing it, promptly and reasonably, better to use the UMG in-house lawyer to block and deflect for three years. Then, when that has failed to drive us away, employ an expensive top London-lawyer to block and deflect with greater authority than Mr. Useless can summon from his common presence.
From everything I have read, the music industry is a really shady place. I have only been a local musician, but even my experience tells me that people come along who want to hussle you for their own purposes (read: money).
I cannot imagine the smiling, hand shaking, music industry snakes and sharks that come out of the woodwork to offer a deal that ends up with the artist losing all rights to their own music, never receiving any royalties, and ending up owing the record company more money than they could earn in a lifetime.
And that's what happened to the lucky ones.