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How do you afford covering so many Beatles songs?
When performers cover another artists’ work they have to pay royalties and I have heard the Beatles catalog is pretty pricey. For instance, when Conan O’Brien was hosting the Tonight Show he was told by the NBC executives that if his band played a Beatles song it would cost NBC $10,000. This might have been an exaggeration for comic effect but nevertheless I am sure it wasn’t dirt cheap either. So I was wondering how you can afford to do multiple albums. Maybe I shouldn’t ask?
On a different note, I noticed your CDs don’t have all the stuff you often see like who wrote the songs, what company publishes the songrights, blah blah blah. Yeah, I imagine not interesting to most people but I’m a geek for that kind of information. Used to love reading all the old liners notes on the original Beatles albums cause you could learn alot of musical history that way. That’s a problem with digital downloads. Anyway, I suspect record labels have people whose job is to keep track of all that stuff and your time is filled up just making the great music.
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1 Reply
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Hi Charles,
The royalties we pay for our Beatles covers are the same as for covering any other artist and they aren’t more or less expensive, at least when it comes to CDs. There is a big difference of using songs on a TV show or movies though as royalties for film are a lot more complicated and expensive, and they are to be negotiated with the respective publishers. We don’t know if $10,000 for the Tonight Show is exaggerated but we wouldn’t be surprised by that number.When it comes to the our liner notes for our original albums there is a lot less to say than with most other bands who have a lot more people involved like producers, arrangers, composers, lyricists, sound engineers, other musicians and the list goes on. As all our songs are all written, recorded, produced and published by ourselves (MonaLisa Twins/Woolgoose Records) there isn’t really much else to say other than … well, exactly that 😉
Orange: “© 2017 Original sound recording by Woolgoose Records. All songs wirtten and played by MonaLisa Twins featuring John Sebastian on blues harp on tracks 3 & 6”However, whenever other musicians were playing on our recordings, we always list them as well as the venue where the song got recorded to give proper credits to everyone and for them to get their share of sales revenue.
Hope that answers your questions 🙂
Best,Lisa
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