Cover me
If there was a formal launch or a press release announcing Charmaine Blackman’s latest effort, we missed it or perhaps we were not invited. But we could not/cannot miss the constant television airing of videos from her album CD ‘Cover Girl’ or is it ‘Kover Girl’?
From what we have heard and seen Charmaine has, much like a prizefighter, moved up in division, covering Leona Lewis’s “Better in Time” and Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy” among other popular latest tracks. Having heard Beyonce’s father Mathew Knowles outraged rant over a version of this same song played on Howard Stern’s Sirius radio show, where someone allegedly “took liberties with her performance… and altered the pitch to make her appear to sing wildly off key – as Stern, co-host Robin Quivers and others giggled along”, we couldn’t help but wonder if… no, not possible.
We are perplexed too at Charmaine’s jumping of genres. She has done reggae, soca, calypso, soul and perhaps others as well; we confess that we have not heard all of Charmaine’s albums. What we do know is that in her over 15 years in the music industry she has been extremely prolific – singing her own music and covering others as well – and should be given props for that as well as for her consistency.
However, we believe that Charmaine has set herself up for a knockout punch with her latest album. We don’t claim to be music critics, but from what we have heard on the street, we are not the only ones feeling like we need to run for cover when tunes from this album hit the airwaves. We feel too that the choice of songs do not fit Charmaine’s physical profile, which also make the videos a bad idea.
But every man/woman to his/her own order. Charmaine has set herself up as a singer; she and her management team must know what they are doing as they have been doing it for 15 years, possibly longer. And since we’re on the subject, given that Charmaine’s team has been vocal about copyright, we decided to check the facts on covering someone’s music.
As it turns out one can sing other people’s songs to one’s heart content. However, when one chooses to immortalize this in album form, one must obtain a mechanical licence. This involves paying a statutory mechanical royalty rate, which is about 10 US cents (might be less) per song once the song is five minutes or less times the number of copies of the song you hope to sell. An additional fee per minute is charged if the song is over five minutes. There are some songs that are simply not available for licencing. But this does not mean that the song cannot be covered, it can be re-recorded and released by anyone who chooses to do so provided that the melody/lyric isn’t substantially altered in the “cover” version, and that the person doing the covering pays proper fees/royalties directly to the song’s copyright holder after negotiations. If someone releases an album with cover songs on it, then tries to obtain proper licensing after the fact, that person can be subject to penalties/prosecution for copyright infringement.
We did our homework and we hope Charmaine and her team did theirs too. (thescene@stabroeknews.com)
