Licencing
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When an artist signs a contract with a record company, that record company owns the rights to exploit the music that that artist has made. "This began centuries ago, as simply the right to make copies for a limited period" (Dann, Underwood, 1997: 24). The copyright in the recording lasts for 50 years, which means a lot of music recorded in past decades, or catalogue material as it is known, is still available to the record companies for exploitation. This provides record companies with a good opportunity to make money, as there are far fewer costs in releasing catalogue material, than there are in recording new material, as there are not the recording or promotional costs such as advances and videos etc. associated with signing a new or existing act.
In general there are three ways that record companies are able to exploit catalogue material which are: Re Issue, compilations, and sync. Due to the limitations of the word count in this essay, I am unable to write in depth about each method of exploitation and therefore will give a brief description of each before talking in more depth about compilation albums.
Re -issue.
A re-issue is an original title by an original artist, which has previously been released and is then 're-issued'. Re-issues have a high profit margin...