Maeve de Bordons speaks with Jennifer Marr about her new venture, The Legal Centre for Dance Music, and its mission to provide legal support to professionals in electronic music.
Contracts can be daunting, even for seasoned professionals in the music industry. With so many intricate clauses, it’s easy to gloss over the details rather than fully understand what’s at stake. The good news, however, is that you don’t have to be a legal expert to protect your interests — there are free resources that can help you navigate the essentials.
I recently met with Jennifer Marr over lunch to discuss one such resource: The Legal Center for Dance Music. Jennifer, an entertainment lawyer and founder of the female-forward music festival 808s & Heartbreaks, has built her career representing electronic artists like RayRay, Alice Longyu Gao, and FiFi Zhang, along with high-profile names such as Ciara, BABYMETAL, Erykah Badu, Godsmack, and Big Wild. Currently practising at the renowned U.S. law firm Myman, Greenspan Fox Rosenberg Mobasser Younger & Light LLP, Jennifer’s experience spans both the legal and music worlds.
As we talked about her journey from agent to attorney and her shared love for the LA rave warehouse scene, it became clear how her passion for independent artists fueled her new venture. The Legal Center for Dance Music aims to demystify the legal side of the industry by offering accessible, free resources for those looking to better understand contracts, rights, and legal protections. It serves as a companion to the traditional music business guides, focusing specifically on the unique challenges faced by electronic artists.
Maeve: How would you advise artists and labels to navigate the legal aspects of the music industry?
Jennifer: Many dance music acts and labels start by putting on parties, where countless hours go into researching venues, booking the right DJ or finding the right sound system. The same amount of time and effort should ideally also be put into catalogue building and the boring stuff like learning the business structures of music distribution and publishing, as well as the laws around music copyrights and contract protections. If you put all of that together, you’re in a really good spot.
It doesn’t mean you’ll never make a mistake in your career, but the critical difference is that you will be making informed decisions every step of the way. If you do decide to take on risk, it allows you to structure your deals and projects so that you can minimise that risk and the chances that you may make a mistake. If it does happen, it’s something that you can recover much more quickly from if you have that knowledge base.
Be careful about what you're putting into AI platforms. Once uploaded, the entire internet may have access to your proprietary work
What’s your take on the rapidly growing number of AI tools emerging daily?
The basic premise is that to win the game, you have to know the rules. We’re seeing the proliferation of a lot of tools. Someone in the USA launched a very unique AI tool where you can upload a record deal and it’ll analyze it. It’s even more important to know how to wield them right. Having something analyse your record deal and tell you what it says is only useful if you can still interpret that summary.
I view the Legal Center for Dance Music as an ethical responsibility and mandate to flip that script permanently. What we hope to provide is a mixture of in-person workshops as well as having easy things like flashcards that have terminology lessons in them, keynotes with business leaders, and just really being a hub of knowledge. The goal is for this to be a free resource for the community.
How does AI operate in a legal landscape that hasn’t fully caught up with the technology?
Statutory law hasn’t caught up with AI. We are already seeing it affect the way we draft and look at contracts. We can’t stop machine learning, but we can try to add contractual protection against unauthorized uses in that space.
In client contracts, I always add the list of restrictions on what you need to come to our clients for approval for, which now includes you cannot use our clients work for AI learning or generative AI learning without our consent, nor use any AI to make replicas of our client’s work or NIL.
If you are licensing or buying someone else’s work, something essential is to ask if they used AI tools, and warn either that an AI author cannot create a work that receives copyright protection (at least in the US) and make clear that the other side is responsible for any liability related to that use of AI. Be careful about what you’re putting into AI platforms. Once uploaded, the entire internet may have access to your proprietary work.
It’s always important for artists to seek trademark and copyright protection via filings and registrations and not just rely on the default common law. It’s key evidence of your ownership if someone actually uses your work without permission. If you want protection for something, whether in the UK or the US with the USPTO, make sure you’re filing for registrations with your applicable governing body.
We can't stop machine learning, but we can try to add contractual protection against unauthorized uses in that space
How does having your legal affairs in order affect personal relationships?
The legal side is also important for relationships and future plans. For example, for female-identifying artists who might want to have children at some point, it’s important to set up a long term structure for their music business, so they can engage in family planning. Creating that structure requires contracts.
We often see friends do a project together, only for it to fall apart and destroy the original relationship, because they failed to have a transparent conversation early on about expectations and economic participation. This is all avoidable with a contract.
Having everything papered up protects relationships. It might feel a little weird or counterintuitive the first time someone brings it up, but the more it becomes normalised, the healthier it is. This applies to a contract with your collaborator, label, or manager. Many times, these conflicts could’ve been avoided if terms around the mutual business expectations had been put in writing. I’ve seen 10-year relationships fall apart over side artist approvals. It’s not just about the money; it will help save relationships, too.
Basic Law Concepts explained by Jennifer Marr
Expectations and Approvals
From understanding how many tracks and projects an artist is expected to release – which might vary depending on the artist’s relationship with the label – to the expected time frame of a release. If a project isn’t released in a specific amount of time, the contract can have provisions against this. Nowadays, there are a variety of contract models, with options to release singles instead of full albums or EPs – allowing for more flexibility on both ends.
Recording Rights and Publishing Rights
It’s helpful to understand the difference between the Recording Industry (Label) and the Publishing Industry (Publisher). Fundamentally, every single song has a sound recording and a musical composition. Back in the day, there was sheet music, and then, there was the phonograph recording of the sheet music – historically, this is the reason why there are two copyrights in a single piece of music, something that has carried on to the present day – which can be confusing for a modern-day producer, as now the writing and recording happen almost simultaneously in your DAW.
The easiest way to think of it is by thinking about how, in every track and every file that you have, two sets of rights are implicated, and there are two completely separate industries. Every time you’re licensing a song, there are two sets of rights.
The goal is for The Legal Center for Dance Music to be a free resource for the community
360 model
The 360 model meant a label would have 360 degrees of rights, from publishing to touring income to merchandise built into the contract. In a label contract, they would also have the rights to your publishing and touring income, which doesn’t really happen anymore unless it is specifically negotiated (or if you are doing a deal in foreign territories like Asia).
The rules of thumb would be that a record label should only have rights to your sound recording, and your publisher should only have rights to your publishing. These days, labels usually control the sound recording, which is how they drive their value by building up catalogues, licensing sound recording rights, streaming royalties from the DSPs, etc (Digital Service Providers). Once you get down to the indie level, especially in the dance music scene, labels do a little more of 360, where certain labels might try to get a publishing interest in an artist’s music so that they can be a “one-stop” for licensing.
Currently, we’re in a place where, in a lot of indie dance music contracts, you will probably see a label get the rights to your sound recording and publishing. They may say they need all those rights to handle all their licensing. In a sense, they’re not wrong. Our industry is young with many artists who don’t really have the savvy to do all their admin or maybe aren’t very on top of their inboxes, so labels do have a good argument on needing to get all those rights.
Collecting music royalties
Every piece of music has two sets of copyrights: sound recording and composition. It’s key to understand how to collect royalties from both sides of that equation – your performance royalties (whether it’s PRO – Performing Rights Organisation – royalties, or SoundExchange / Neighboring Rights), what types of royalties are implicated by streaming, and fundamental concepts like what are mechanical royalties.
I like to think of it as rain falling down the sky, think of it as raining money, as cheesy as that is. Signing up to the correct entities will help create rain buckets that help capture the money that’s flowing. I really encourage people to educate themselves about each royalty stream and try to collect all of it.
Work Made for Hire
It’s a concept in copyright law, especially in the US, where if you create something because someone hired you to do it, the copyright belongs to the person who hired you. There’s a lot of nuance to that, but that’s the basic idea.
The critical thing to note is that for a “work for hire” to be effective – a signed document is required. If you hire a mixer or feature artist to work on your track, and you expect to own the entire sound recording – make sure you’re getting signed work-for-hires from those collaborators. This applies equally to anyone creating other creative works for you (like your tour flyers and merch designs).
If someone hires you to be a ghost producer on their track, or a label releases your track by owning the sound recording, and they ask you to sign a work-for-hire for their ownership, there’s an expectation that the copyrights in the work will be owned by that person who’s commissioned you. It’s not necessarily an evil concept, and it’s a widespread thing. The key is to understand what that means and what the implications are.
Trademark Law
Trademarks can be expensive, but there’s always a time in place to go through the lengthy process of registering them. Before you invest a lot of time and resources into a brand that you’ll never be able to register, it’s essential to do those checks.
Artists will ask us questions like “Do we need to register it right now?” That’s when we can help counsel you, look at your budget, where you’re at in your career, and what markets you’re playing, and decide from there. Some considerations can be overwhelming, and hopefully, if you have a team or a good lawyer by your side, they can help walk you through that.
Find out more about The Legal Center for Dance Music. Find Jennifer Marr on Instagram.
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