"Basically, it was Universal that was driving me crazy for the last six months" to put Petty's catalogue on the Internet, said Tony Dimitriades, Petty's manager for the past 28 years. "From our point of view, we wanted to make sure the business model had no unfair implications for the fans or for Tom."
But Napster had no say in the decision by Petty and his management to hold back the outtake songs.
"I got a call from Universal Music Group saying, 'You can't make these songs available,' " said Aileen Atkins, Napster's chief counsel and negotiator.
Atkins's job, and the job of Napster President Michael J. Bebel, was to persuade Petty to choose Napster over the other online services for his launch. They did so by promising the rocker prominent placement in an extensive print and Internet promotion campaign; in exchange, Napster got exclusive rights to sell songs in the catalogue for two weeks before it appears on other online services.
Petty's picking and choosing illustrates why trying to buy music over the Internet can be alternately satisfying and frustrating. It is fairly easy to buy a song, but it can be much harder to find a song worth buying. That is why unauthorized services, such as Kazaa and LimeWire, still have millions of users, despite the music industry's lawsuits designed to stop unauthorized sharing. Computer users who flout copyright laws by using such services have been able to download all of Petty's songs free for years. They also can often find their favorite musician's videos, live performances and television appearances.
New Deals for Digital Rights
Contracts between musicians and labels signed before about 1998 do not include language spelling out how the parties should be paid for Internet music sales, or the digital rights, so contracts must be renegotiated, which often takes months. Best-selling musicians who have more control over their songs can hold out for more money from their labels before agreeing to sell their songs on the Internet. Many musicians have trepidations about the Internet because they think of it as the place where their songs get stolen.
"Every time a major artist signs on [to sell music online,] record companies use it as leverage to get other holdout artists to sign on," Dimitriades said. "You can be sure the Universal people are calling up whoever their holdouts are and telling them, 'Tom Petty just signed on.' " The artists are not the only subject of such negotiations. Each song has a performance-rights royalty, which is paid to the musician when a song is played, and a publishing-rights royalty, which is paid to the songwriter. A performer may want to sell a song on the Internet but the songwriter may not.
Songs that include samples of other songs, particularly rap songs, can involve a tangle of rights. The performer who sampled a song may want to sell his song online, but the sampled performer may not; likewise, the songwriter who wrote the sampled music may not.
No Tunes by the Beatles
Music companies have more luck with some of their artists than with others. England's EMI Group, the world's third-largest music company, gave Courtney Love's latest single, "Mono," to Napster, iTunes and Musicmatch for sale in the second week of December at the same time it was given to radio stations for play.
But EMI's biggest act, the Beatles, remains intransigent. EMI distributes the Beatles' songs but the group's performance rights are owned by the band members and spouses. (Michael Jackson owns the publishing rights.) EMI has held numerous meetings with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and the rest of the tight group that controls perhaps the most-loved songs in the pop canon. So far the group remains unswayed. It is not surprising; the Beatles were among the last artists to license their songs for sale on CD, in the 1980s. "We hope they agree to make their works available very soon, " EMI spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer said.
