 Pow, what's up everybody once again it's Bram and Sean and I have a very special episode for you guys today because I sat down with George Fockes of MyContractExplained.com where you can get your contract explained in simple basic terms if you're having struggles and troubles. Now, for this sit down we went into three contracts that a lot of artists come across because there's popular music services of AWOL, Amuse, and United Masters and there's seven interesting things that I pulled from our long sit down where you can get access to the whole thing in the description. But the seven things that I'll go through in this video, they're crazy, they're kind of crazy or interesting to say the least. So let's go ahead and get into it. Number one. So this is like material that they can collect from you. So like this is information that they have the right to collect from you. So they can digitize and encode the recordings and related materials to digital files including any related processes such as fingerprinting to make any necessary modifications to the recording. Fingerprints? Why exactly? I mean that just seems a little bit too serious. But let's get into something that's a little bit more serious. So they may make material changes to the agreement according to their own discretion. They will let you know via email or within their own service whether the agreement has changed but they do not always notify you in advance. In these cases if you didn't know the agreement changed simply by continuing to use their service you have now involuntarily accepted their changes officially. So that's another important point is that if they change the agreement and you don't know that they changed the agreement but you still keep using their services that counts as you accepting the new terms of agreement. I just love the fact that they said involuntarily officially. Right. No, I think actually I might add that. Well I mean that you said that. I like that because that's what actually, that's what's happening what is, is yeah. Essentially, yeah. Yeah. Involuntarily, officially, yeah. Now that clip spoke for itself and that contract that we were reading off of in that clip was the MUSE contract but pretty much all of them have some version of that. So that's something just to keep in mind at the very least because man I mean what's the point of signing a contract if the thing can change without you knowing. So let's keep going. Five. Company shall have the right to exploit the user content in any manner here under free from adverse claim and without any obligation to make any payment of any nature to any person or entity other than the amounts payable to you here under. So what this means is that essentially they figure out a way to exploit your user content in some way other than what is described in these conditions. They essentially don't owe you for that new exploitation that they've discovered. So for whatever way that they decide to kind of make a profit from your music, if it's not explicitly described in this agreement then they don't actually owe you anything from that. All right. So this is interesting for a few reasons. So let me break it down like this. Then I get it like anybody who's like yo man they can figure out how to make money with my music and I not get paid that's crazy. I know a lot of artists aren't going to like to hear something like that. But it does list quite a few scenarios and it's something that most people would see and say yo these are pretty much all the ways that I'm looking to make money anyway or I don't know of any scenarios what didn't get covered. But when you even think about it, MP3s didn't always exist. So we had times where it was tape cassettes, people were phasing out of tape cassettes and moving to CDs. MP3s weren't on people's mind so you might be getting CD revenue and tape cassette revenue and all the other things that come top of mind for revenue at that time that are available when MP3s come out. Eventually the company is saying yo we might find this new medium, this new route and start making money this way and you aren't necessarily able to get the benefit of that financially. That's a weird aspect and loophole in the contract. It seems pretty interesting to see something like that listed but it's not completely foreign in the music industry because there's contracts where you might say yo man we're in the United States. Why do y'all say in the entire universe? There's terminologies like that in some contracts where it's saying universe, not United States in another country or another country or the world, no the entire universe. They're factoring for all these aspects for a reason and that language is there for a reason when it comes to the rights that the company gets. But I move on, let's see what's next. That'd be a fair enough assessment. Yeah, pretty much, yeah so essentially that latter part of that comment and it's going to be more important. Once submitted for potential delivery to third party, user no longer has rights to that content or the right to grant other third parties any rights to that content. So basically the content that you give to the company to deliver to a potential third party as soon as it's actually submitted, the user doesn't have any rights to that piece of content that United submitted to a third party. Now again that's something that might rub artists the wrong way and I understand that perspective but on a business side of things, you don't want to be able to make a promise to one of your partners, let's say the NBA, NFL, Coca-Cola, whoever saying that you have the rights to use this and pitch this to them well all of a sudden you might be in the background as an artist pitching this to a competitor. So once they start to pitch things, they withhold rights like there's an understandable side from a business perspective because that just helps them stay understanding with whoever their partners are. That's just one aspect of it and I should mention that all of these things should be looked at from multiple perspectives when you read contracts. One you want to read it on the most literal level that you might interpret it at but two you want to get as cynical as possible and most lawyers are going to get cynical with it because although some things might not be likely, although some things might not be the intent of the company or whoever you're doing a contract with, it's kind of in the best interest to be cynical because it still might happen and a lawyer is all about like hey let's create insurance. So this particular situation right here, I understand again from a business perspective where look that's kind of protecting themselves and how they deal with artists but the artist again, of course you can have plenty of reasons where you might be salty in losing your rights. That's just what comes with it though. Are you going to pitch? Do you want to put in serious work to make brand deals happen and things like that? It's your own. Yeah, you retain all your ownership but AWOL reserves the right to decide not to distribute specific music if they don't want to or if they deem it inappropriate or unsatisfactory. These are vacant rooms so again these could mean anything and they could basically take your song and if they deem for whatever reason that you shouldn't be credited for whatever reason they can choose not to credit you for one of your best work. Alright so the only thing I want to focus on from that particular clip is language like inappropriate, unsatisfactory, reasonable. What do they mean? You don't really know. It's objective language. So a lot of times you want to watch out for stuff like that in your contracts because it allows people to do things where you can't necessarily move against them because it's up for interpretation and likely the people who have more power, better lawyers could win in those scenarios against you because they know how to twist and turn all the knobs that happen when it comes to legalese. So point is if somebody intends for something but happen to use subjective language, figure out what they mean by it, make it more specific to what is actually supposed to be saying versus leaving it ambiguous or hey maybe you're on the side where that ambiguous language benefits from you so you don't want to do it whatever right but just understand that subjective language could lead to positives and negatives. So we got two more of these seven crazy, slash weird things that you should be aware of in these particular contracts. Here's another one. So I marked this part later in this paragraph. They give us the statement additionally, user acknowledges and agrees that company receives many submissions, some of which may be similar or may be similar to content being independently developed by company and company is free to work with artists with similar submissions or proceed with developing its own content without any obligation to user. So I thought that this was an interesting section to include because if you think about what they're saying, essentially what they're saying is that basically in the event that they consider or listen to your music but choose not to go with you as an artist and then two weeks later you find out that United created their own artist that sounds exactly like you, looks like you, is your brand basically but it's just a different name or a different artist then that's completely fine and they're allowed to do that. You can't really, you can't really sue them for that or rather they make you legally acknowledge that and agree with the fact that the company receives many submissions some of which may be similar. So in the off chance that you see an artist signed with United right after you and you notice that this artist literally is your exact brand and you think some dirty dirty plays might have happened in the background, right here it's legally telling you that you've already acknowledged that this might happen and you have nevertheless agreed to this agreement so that's a little bit of a sketchy move. Alright I already know a lot of people are going to hear basically the interpretation that George had right and I get it right that doesn't sound too cool from an artist standpoint but from a business standpoint I can completely get it like these types of distribution services or just companies that are dealing with a lot of artists this is particularly the United Masters contract and all these contracts are completely public by the way like I wouldn't understand any other way to actually deal with something like that actually because you're dealing with a lot of artists on your distribution service you don't even necessarily know who all of them are probably because there's a lot of artists that are coming in you're not day-to-day working with each one individually so if some of them happen to be similar you don't want to be liable to have to deal with that right maybe they go against each other if they have something going on but that has nothing to do with you you're not taking part in that necessarily part of business of course the language does allow you to do something intentional but just generally speaking that's something that could just be there for the crazies who are looking to come at a big company because they have money and they see other things that are varying on the platform so many artists have similar music they just do so I don't know on that one but last but not least and before I get into this last one which is extremely important for you guys to just just see and think about that most people do not consider I just want to make sure I thank George Fockes for doing this if you want to get a contract explained to you in simple language get understanding of loopholes and things involved go over there to my contract explain but without further ado here's the last clip it's an important one y'all for this specific agreement any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with these terms of service or the breach termination or invalidity thereof shall be finally settled by Swedish courts with the Stockholm district court as the first instance unless otherwise provided by mandatory law the thing about this is obviously alright this is Swedish court a wall is what is it London my British court or something who's the either United or a wall was British court is American is it's American okay okay so yeah a wall but we'll and we'll get into that when we talk about the a wall one but I'm saying that just because there's different courts and different laws and I think we assume because everything is global we have access to these things in different places and it feels native you don't you're not thinking oh I'm doing dealing with a company from X but if something goes down that's when it gets real where you have to actually deal with it in that place that that company has chosen right to where things matter and where they'll litigate things because if you even if you look at a situation like ASAP Rocky he got arrested in Sweden over the summer right the way a lot of things were getting handled we're confusing for a lot of people looking from an American lens like okay this isn't going how we thought it should go obviously of course there were some other related things where you might be getting information out of context but the point is understanding that these different courts do have different laws and different norms right so whatever seems to be right exactly from what you're used to might not be the right way they have a different right way so some of that could determine how you choose to deal with the company will it hope to deal with the court in these situations no but just understand that that's where it could go