Why I Had To Kneecap The Promo Video for My New Novelette "Butterfly" (Capitalism Is The Villain)

 OK, so I created a new promo video for my upcoming novelette (we're talking Labor Day!) "Butterfly." Here is the original video I shot, with the music I originally used:

Pretty cool, eh? I think so. Went beyond my expectations for such a simple video. There was just one problem: the music is owned by the band Swingrowers, and copyright issues being what they are, I couldn't use the video as is. I had to kneecap it, strictly for legal reasons. (Here's a link to the original Swingrowers song, it's great, definitely check it out.) I went through Microsoft's catalog of public domain music for videos on its video player, and it was a HORRIBLE experience. The Microsoft public  domain stuff  was the sort of thing you might hear in an elevator going to hell. I finally chose the least bad of the options because I didn't have weeks to spend looking for something good in the public domain. (And because there was a very good chance that there was nothing good for my purposes anywhere in the public domain.)

And I came up with this video:

It's not nearly the video that my original was. The public domain music is barely tolerable, and it was FAR better than the rest. And that cheeses me off. Because I feel that my video of the naked dancing fairy added value to the song. It created something different and new that people might enjoy.  I finally wound up having to link to the Swingrowers videos (same link seen earlier in this post) and  recommending that viewers play the video at no volume while listening to the Youtube video. Which works after a fashion, but jeeze, what a kludge.

Of course having created the song "Butterfly" Swingrowers has every right to profit from it. And I have no right to profit from it. And I'm not profiting from it. The most you can say is that the video might have eventually led people to my book site, but let's face it, nobody buys a book because of the music that accompanied a promotional video for it. Or to put it in financial terms, if there was a way to fairly compensate Swingrowers for every sale of my book that was based on the fact that people liked their song in my promo video, I might at the end of the year owe then a nickel. Or not.

Of course the Swingrowers could give permission for me to run my video with their music for free. But that isn't the way capitalism works, is it? Capitalism works to make it very difficult for people to get permission to use music, and very easy to pay royalties to companies to use music if you've got lots of money. In fact, capitalism creates enforcement arms to track down people who use music/art without permission (think RIAA). And those royalties are expensive! Here is a link showing what an expensive, pain in the ass process it is to license a song, particularly a popular song.

At the very least  you might think there could be an easy, cheap alternative way to get good music for videos, etc., that aren't making money. There is not. You can make a cover of a popular song if you're a musician, and you won't owe anybody a penny, so long as you clearly credit the originators of the song you are covering. But I am not a cover band. I am a self-published erotica writer, and the message we self-published erotica writers get from the music industry (as well as the publishing industry, a lot of other industries and the government, frankly) is a loud and enthusiastic "FUCK OFF!"

Contrast that with the art industry. There are all sorts of ways of obtaining  permission to use art for commercial use, some of them affordable even to low-lifes like me. As I've said, I use Depositphotos.com art for my book covers all the time. They have a huge selection of artwork and you can buy commercial rights to use them even when your sales are as low as mine. Frankly, you could afford to use Depositphotos.com stuff on a hobbyist's budget. And DepositPhotos.com is not the only organization out there that distributes art at reasonable prices. It has several competitors.

The reason Internet has affordable artwork for publishers is a matter of the way the industry works. Photographers take many photos in a commercial shoot but only a tiny fraction of them get bought by the customer. Most of the unsold images just go into the photographer's portfolio. When commercial sites started offering art to customers on a pay-per-use basis, it didn't take photographers and artists long to realize that if they dumped the contents of their portfolios on said sites, they might actually make money off some of those unused photos after all. Not nearly as much as they normally did, perhaps, but so what? They weren't making ANY money off the images before that. The photographer makes money off of the images he couldn't sell the client, the distributor gets a wide selection of photos to offer to customers (and takes a cut off each sale, I presume) and marginal publishers or self-publishers get a lot of great photos and artwork to use for their covers at reasonable prices. Win-win-win! 

(I assume that the exact same logic applies for commercial art as well, which is why DepositPhotos and others have so much good art in their inventories.)

There are also distributors of free public domain images out there. Most of the legit ones tend to have very small or very outdated selections of images. There are some with large selections of public domain images out there, but publisher beware: a couple of the public domain sites I've browsed have had images that clearly were NOT legally allowable for commercial use. For example, on one such site I found a very nice vector graphic of the Enterprise from Star Trek, very realistic right down to the NCC-1701 on the hull. I'm pretty sure nobody at Paramount Studios authorized that artwork for public domain use. And even if the artwork was created by an artist not associated with Paramount Studios, I'm pretty sure Paramount has the Enterprises' image trademarked.

So copyright works pretty well in the art world, but not at all well in the music world. It prevents creators from creating original works that people might enjoy.  And that's a damned shame. I'm glad there's no barriers like that in book publishing (there certainly used to be). It was a much sadder and sorrier profession when the big publishers were able to gatekeep all but a select few out of the industry.

Like the music business is now.