Debate deepens over artists' web interviews.

Most of the dotcoms may have gone dotbomb, but as Universal's confirmation of its GetMusic purchase last week confirmed, the online musical landscape is still being redrawn. Informed observers suggest it is now starting to settle down, with the majors attempting to refine their individual strategies and a few key start-ups emerging as serious players. Yet there are still certain fundamental issues underpinning this landscape that are still to be worked out -- and none more important than rights ownership.

Currently arousing interest in the management and artistic communities are the claims quietly being advanced by some labels' business affairs departments over websites' use of artists' non-music related content such as spoken-word interviews and photographic images.

Six months ago, BMG started to issue its Click Licensing Agreement (CLA) demanding that websites pay for using all its artist-related materials online, in turn prompting some well-informed managers to call on the Music Managers Forum to get involved. Now BMG appears to have begun to treat the medium as less of a threat and has backed-off from attempts to charge for use of content such as artist images, replacing its CLA with a less aggressive Standard Marketing Agreement (SMA).

"We expect to get paid every time a radio station plays our music in Europe because they use our content to make money for themselves. I don't see the difference when it comes to [magazine or website] publishers -- the record company and artist should get a cut or revenues built on copyrighted content," says newly-installed BMG UK chairman Hasse Breitholtz. "If I was an artist, I would be thinking seriously about how to monetise online appearances to add to my revenues of merchandise, ticket and record sales."

The question over whether artists can expect to earn income from appearing online is a relevant one, even if the sums are pretty small at this stage. However, the issue that has now galvanised the MMF into action is whether record companies should be attempting to own such content.

Respected long-standing manager and MMF board member Gall Colson came across the issue recently when one of her artists' appearance on the web was delayed by a dispute between the record company and the website. Colson says the record company was trying to get the website to assign ownership of the "live performance interview" to the label. Unsurprisingly, she sought to overrule the label and to give the interview the go-ahead. "The label in question was trying to infer that an online interview is a performance, which they should have the rights to," she says. "This has apparently been tried with a few artists -- and it's an outrageous attempt by record companies to gain access to rights they don't own."

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