The Return of Everything Real
How to Make a Lot of Changes in a Short Period of Time
Mark Rushton’s Perseverance in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
This week’s topics:
Letter of Relinquishment
Physical Media as Art Objects
DISCO Tech
Dirty Knobs
Letter of Relinquishment
On June 30, 2024, my music publishing company, Mark Rushton Music, became a free agent again for the first time in 5 or 6 years.
I left Songtrust, a publishing administrator that was fine in the beginning, but lately I discovered wasn’t doing their job in a timely manner - mainly registering my titles with ASCAP, The MLC, and other collection societies around the world.
It’s been 588 days since anything has been registered with ASCAP, the performing rights organization I’ve been with since 2002. And it’s been over a year since anything has been registered with The MLC, the Mechanical Licensing Collective, in the US.
Not only that, but in the picture above you can see duplicated entries into ASCAP’s database. Each title should have three entries (Writer, Publisher, ASCAP share), but some have 6, 9, or even 12 entries. I’ll get that cleaned up in the next week or two.
Switching over has been a breeze, even during a holiday week. ASCAP had me updated in the first 24 hours. Music Reports and Harry Fox Agency should be done soon. And I bet The MLC gets things started next week.
I signed up for MCPS, the UK mechanical collection society. They had a $500 entry fee (ouch!). I’m also signing up soon for CMRRA (Canada), which is free. And APRA AMCOS in Australia, also free.
This should cover about 98% of my mechanical royalty collection around the world. There’s no need to pay some company 15% to “not register” my titles and to cause problems with side deals I want to make with my catalog.
Physical Media as Art Objects
I’ll soon be offering physical media editions of my music.
Look at this - I had a buy a CD burner and some media! And some disc labels.
I wasn’t going to mess with those janky jewel cases of yore, so I got some durable plastic boxes.
I’m going to experiment with making custom covers and sleeves for the compact discs, probably with my thermal printer, Tyvek sheets, and acrylic ink. I’d like them to be original art objects.
Why not? I’ve got all the audio and art files. The above was a minor investment.
It’ll be another few weeks before I have something completed.
They will be for sale on my Bandcamp site, so if you’re not Following Me there, go Follow Me.
DISCO Tech
From now and until at least the end of the year, I’ll be busy remastering new music and tracks going back to 2020 for inclusion into my DISCO.AC library.
In addition to the above, I have a couple of “albums” already completed except for the artwork. The goal is to attract sync libraries and music supervisors for use in film, TV, and commercial purposes. Companies are interested in licensing my recordings, so more about that topic in the future.
I’ll let everybody on this playlist (or who finds this post) click through and have a listen.
Here are streaming links to:
It’s OK to Disappear (at DISCO)
Brighter Curves (at DISCO)
Links will be good as long as the music is up there. If I do an exclusive deal with a company, the music will have to come down.
The Dirty Knobs
Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs on Wednesday, July 3rd, at Hoyt Sherman Auditorium in Des Moines. Met my old MCI colleague Shane Deam there. Campbell and drummer Steve Ferrone are both 74 years old, but the band played over 2 1/2 hours. I'm sure the Boomer crowd expected nothing but Tom Petty songs, but Campbell mostly played Dirty Knobs songs, particularly from their latest album. They did play Even the Losers, along with two deep tracks Campbell co-wrote on Into The Great Wide Open. The encore closer was Runnin' Down A Dream, which Campbell also co-wrote.
During the set, Mike had to do something with his guitar, so Steve Ferrone stepped out and talked to the audience for a while. I knew Ferrone had played with a lot of big names. He started with the Average White Band, became Roger Taylor's replacement in Duran Duran, and had been the drummer in Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers for nearly 25 years. But he also worked with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson, Johnny Cash, Pat Metheny, and, well, everybody else. And he mentioned he was in the audience the previous night at Hoyt Sherman to see Little Feat.
I bet a lot of people wouldn’t think I’d be up for a concert like this. Just because I make those weird ambient electronic avant-garde noises doesn’t mean I’m not into other kinds of music.