Yorkie wrote:Surpinto wrote:Nice find Jimmy. Very interesting.
JimmyRiddle wrote:I take it the 'producing new album' is the referring to the 'Libera in America' CD/DVD which hasn't yet been released in the Philippines?
Does it? I thought only Warner had the rights to that album. I admit almost complete ignorance on the details of music production so I may be missing something obvious. It's shocking that it wasn't released in the Philippines yet. What the heck is up with that?
Are they still with Warner? There was something mentioned recently (probably to do with the performance in Japan) about a LIbera 'label' or something like that which made me wonder if they were branching out on their own. It is definitely possible these days to release your own records, are Libera going to have a go too?
Can't rember exactly what or where I saw it though.....
Ok, I've now looked into this and it would appear that they are not "with Warner" the way that a big name artist is with a record label traditionally. If you look carefully at the back of the latest CD you will see that there is â„— symbol which is followed by the name Robert Prizeman. This means that he has granted Warner the rights to the recordings done at the National Shrine only; not to the underlying musical compositions. It turns out that the â„— stands for phonogram copyright which is the copyright on the recordings only.
In the image below the copyright notice has ℗ first which mean that only the phonogram copyright is being given away. Then the © indicates that the new copyright
holder is Warner.
What that means is that Libera can re-record that entire CD and release it through any label or independently; they just can't use the specific recordings they already made at the National Shrine. I've looked and all of their CDs are like that as you can see below. Maybe everyone except me knew this but I was fascinated to learn all of this today
.
So why use Warner? Well, the distribution, physical CD manufacturing, and advertising are probably factors. They wouldn't need to warehouse the CDs; and, as Dani mentioned, translating everything in order to sell it in markets that are not English speaking is off their shoulders. Remember that elaborate
Libera Kiosk (link courtesy of Libera Timeline and Amy) at a record store in Tiawan? That's all Warner.
The
Libera Records website that provided us with all of those initial photographs in Japan on their
their Facebook page is a company called
Wisteria Project Inc. It would appear that Takatsugu Muramatsu (composer of the music in "Song of Life") is affiliated with this company as well.
What is not clear, and may not be public knowledge at all, is the nature of the professional relationship between this company and Libera. Maybe they have an album deal or maybe they only work on publicity kinds of things like the USJ trip. I do not know. But one consistent theme with Libera has been that since they record everything in their own studio and with their own people, they have the luxury of retaining creative copyright and control over their music. Whereas many artists have traditionally needed money and equipment and studio time all up front and gave up their rights to their own compositions in exchange for that.
Also, the single they released on iTunes of America was released, I believe, independently. So they do occasionally do that I guess.