Wednesday, July 06, 2022

Licensing

The Man You Trust has been completed for almost two months now. 

Why can't you read it? Because I used three lines from two different songs, and I can't get the publishing companies to respond to my request for a license to use them. 

It should be fairly straightforward. You send an email to the publisher, they respond, you pay a small fee, and it's all fine. 

Except this time, it's not fine. 

Five written requests in the last two months to one publisher (Round Hill Music), as well as two phone calls. Two requests to the publisher of the other song (Sony). 

Not one answer in return. All my requests--through their official channels for such a request--have landed in the Licensing Black Hole. 

It's incredibly frustrating, because those same companies will sue the pants off you if you use lyrics without a license. So they'll sue you, but they ignore your requests to do it legally. 

As I work on the plot for the next book, This Doesn't Feel Like The Future, which will be ready to start writing in September, it's driving me crazy that I have a finished book I can't proceed to publish. 

I'm going to give it another few weeks, then find songs before 1925, because those will be royalty-free. The problem, though, is that the two songs I'm using are the ideal songs to use. 

I may just have to get over it. There are 80,000+ words in this book. Three sentences can't matter that much. Well, to me they do, but not to anyone else.

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