Musician's Business and Legal Guide

People think music business is all about creation and keeping the fans happy. Well it mostly is but a young artist can become stuck in all that legal stuff. For somebody who is new that can be very difficult and people could take advantage of this and try to cheat you so this book is about all the legal involved aspects of the music business. This book will offer you a detailed explanation of everything that concerns the people in the music business. After you read it you will know what to avoid and understand the issues as they are explained in an easy and franc manner.

I bought this book to fill out my music law library. Among the many books I have read are Passman's book "Everything You Need to Know About the Music Industry", "This Business of Music", and even Moses Avalon's more gritty book "Confessions of a Record Producer." While all of these books provide a great deal helpful information to understanding the music business, they are not really books that contain samples of what the actual contracts look like. I bought The Musician's Business and Legal Guide a while back just because of the sample contracts. After sorting through the plentiful boilerplate contracts, I found that the information prefacing the agreements, i.e. that actual chapter contents, were even more invaluable than the contracts, which in themselves are pretty thorough. While I use my own hybrid, individualized contracts for the entertainment clients I represent through my law practice, I find myself constantly flipping back to this book as a reference since it covers such a wide range of information. In addition, the annotations in the sample contracts helps to illustrate the degrees of flexibility usually available to those contracts and what the terms actually mean. This book is definitely not, as another reviewer stated, a book that you set out to read from cover to cover like Passman's book, but it works tremendously well as a reference to go to from time to time. My copy is highlighted and marked all up (and I'm one who normally writes in books). The value of this book seriously exceeds its cost, and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to see how the concepts discussed in other music business books play out legally.

This book covers the gammit of what every working musician or artist should know. From music publishing to copyright agreements, defining a business plan to writing contracts, this book has helped to explain the basics and beyond, time and time again. Great investment.

This book is a great find! It covers many aspects of the music industry that are not only of interest to artist, but others in the industry as well. This book is a great investment even containing sample contracts and explanations so you can understand what they are saying without having a law degree.

This book is a must read for anybody entering the music business, whether at the superstar level or in your home studio. It has everything you need to get started and not ripped off, from copies of record contracts to getting label artwork. Not only is this book focused and informative, it is also written in easy to understand laguage.