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Get Informed About The Legal Side of The Music Industry

The artist assigns to the Company with full title guarantee all rights (including but not by way of limitation audio-visual rights) in all master recordings made by the artist during the term.

As you can see the Record Company requires these rights in order to release and then distribute the work. It is important for the artist to realise that these rights only refer to those in the music made within the timescale of the contract. So all other music written or performed before the deal will remain the artists and cannot be exploited by the record company unless expressly stated. If though the last three words were missing from the above clause then the Company would have rights over all previous work done by the artist. This could be a major issue as that artist may have assigned those rights to someone else or simply not want earlier material to ever be heard!

Many first Recording deals will have various options that are bound to excite the budding new artist but may only be in the contract to fool them. An option is a common legal tool that gives the Company the choice to continue "plugging" the artist if their early releases are successful. This sounds fair enough but can lead to an artist effectively being dropped but still bound to the label for a number of years. An example of this can be seen below. Here is a clause dealing with release targets which may appear to contract the artist to a long term album deal but could allow the company to back out after the first single:
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