"Translations" - official, legal, hard copies?

[Jono]

I was just reading about licensing of cover songs for "real" release, and, you know--I keep thinking about Translations. I think if we really tried hard enough and everyone pitched in (musical contributors and other fans) it could really happen.

http://www.cleverjoe.com/articles/music_copyright_law.html is what I'm reading; it's one guy's story of getting rights to release his own cover album. This guy covered a bunch of different artists; for us, we'd have the distinct advantage of having one person being the writer of each song (with some possible exceptions; I don't know off the top of my head). From the looks of it, the Harry Fox Agency has every song we've covered available for licensing, or darn near it.

What do you guys think? This won't (and can't) happen right away, and of course I can't finance everything, and there's a lot more research to do, but I want to see if we can generate some interest and decide whether really to move on. I know some people back when we were getting ready to put the compilation out were talking about pro mastering, and we have a good handful of excellent graphic artists, and the musical contributions are, of course, already ready (although I would probably use such an opportunity to improve my own contributions ), so I know the resources are here.

[Zelönka 22]

What if we give it away for free? Buyer only pays shipping.
Or if done through an online printing/packaging service, they also pay for automatically.

I'm not sure, but it sounds legal to me..

[Jono]

I'm not sure, but it sounds legal to me..

It's not. One needs a mechanical license even when not charging for distribution of a cover.

Since obtaining a mechanical license does enable one to legally charge for a cover recording, why not, to recoup some of the costs? Personally, I would not want to charge much for the album, but one should keep in mind Jason would actually get some royalties from the sales.

[Zelönka 22]

Maybe. But I honestly don't think many would be interested in purchasing a covers album.. Then again, I might be wrong again.

[Jono]

Yeah. We can discuss pricing (if any) at a later point. Here's, I guess, the question we need to answer first: how many copies would we want to start off? Would 100 (CD-R) be good enough? I don't know if duplication services would even do such an odd number, but what about 200 or 250? Or, would we want to go all the way and get pressed CDs (that's as opposed to burned CD-Rs), where the minimum amount would be something like 1000?

The amount of CDs produced at a time would have a direct impact on the cost of royalties paid (and I think royalties are paid regardless of whether one charges for the recording or not)--for a song under five minutes, 100 copies made would only be $9.10 per song, but 1000 would be $91. So think that over.

I'm going to go ahead and contact music contributors individually about this project.