Marley's Legacy (2007)

CMJ considers Marley's legacy (October 23, 2007)

'Music Legacies' panel tackles posthumous releases and keeping the spirit of great artists alive

By Dream Hampton / BobMarley.com

Long before today's crop of industry-minded music festivals was born, the CMJ Music Marathon had made a habit out of saturating New York City with new music, film and panel discussions. Now in its 27th year, CMJ has developed a keen sense of how to use its industry hindsight to comment on what's happening in music today in fields like new media.
On Friday Oct. 16 at New York University, BobMarley.com's own Barry Cole sat on a panel dedicated to "Music Legacies," an examination of dynastic music estates and the challenges of handling a musician's catalog posthumously. Paula Katz, Assistant Vice President of Legal Affairs at non-profit rights organization, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) moderated the discussion between panelists Caitlin Crowell, daughter of country music innovator Rodney Crowell; Vincent Wilburn Jr., nephew of jazz great Miles Davis and co-executor of his estate; Maureen Yancey, mother of underground hip-hop producer J Dilla; and Cole, who in addition to founding BobMarley.com manages over 8,000 copyright licenses for Island Records including theMarley catalog.

Katz began the panel with the euphemistic understatement that "families can be complicated," and proceeded to engage the panel's experts on topics that ranged from the deeply personal to the sometimes confounding details of music contracts, many of which, like Marley's, were drafted in the mid 1970s.

Cole explained to the audience, many of them born well into the 1980s, how difficult it can be monitor the reproduction of Marley's material. His enormous, decades-long popularity, coupled with his worldwide appeal present enormous challenges, particularly in regards to "bootleg" or unauthorized musical reproductions. "For every one legal CD, there are five to seven that are unauthorized that the family doesn't get paid for," Cole explained to the audience. His strategy, he said, was to reissue songs that may have been previously out of print or production and resurrect them, thus satisfying the consumers' bottomless appetite for all things Bob Marley. "We find that when given the opportunity, fans will support the official release."

Cole also elaborated on his motivation for drafting the business plan for BobMarley.com. Two magazine articles shocked him into action. One posited that while Marley was as iconic an image as Che Guevara, 80% of the population knew little more of his musical legacy than Legacy itself, his top-selling greatest hits collection.

The other was a Rolling Stone article that estimated and compared the values of the estates of deceased music legends. "Elvis Presley's was valued at 350 million," Cole remembered. "And Bob Marley's was 13 million." The numbers, Cole said, were no reflection of Marley's global impact or his undiminished presence on today's global music scene. Two years ago, on the eve of a Los Angeles memorial service for Mrs. Yancey's son, who died after a painful struggle with lupus, Cole was inspired into action. "I couldn't sleep [the night before the memorial]," he told Yancey, seated on the opposite end of the panel. "I got up at 5am and wrote a business plan for BobMarley.com."

Yancy, who had moved to Los Angeles to care for her dying son, told a heart-wrenching story of learning to record shop for vinyl and setting up a mini-studio and turntables in J Dilla's hospital room so he could create his final album from his bed. "I knew that if he was going to heal that he would need to make music. It was his life." While her son tried to hold onto life, his attorneys came to his mother for everything. Once he passed, she said, "I lost power of attorney and have yet to see a dime from the final album I helped him produce."

Wilburn addressed Katz's initial point about the challenge of family when he spoke of having to mourn his uncle, who'd given him his first drum kit and having to "switch to business mode quickly, almost immediately. You really don't have time to mourn." Wilburn shares responsibility for managing the prolific Miles Davis catalog with his first cousins, two of Davis's children. "We get 10-15 calls a day on licensing and publishing issues. The three of us have daily conference calls." Wilburn agreed with Cole that bootlegging of Davis's material was often a daunting task. He recounted a story told to him by widow of jazz legend Charles Mingus. "Mingus's wife went into Tower and tried to take all the bootlegs out of the bin and walk out of the store." The story brought loud laughs from the audience. "We don't want to be the police," Wilburn insisted to the young audience who've come of age in the era of file sharing. "We just want a fair share for our artists."

Katz also had the unenviable job of re-directing the conversation to licenses and publishing. Cole recounted in detail the recent headline-making story of the legal quagmire involving the Marley estate, Universal Records and Verizon, who have been using Marley's music and likeness for ring tone. While he went into detail about the controversy, his final point summed up the spirit in which the organizers' convened the panel: "You have to fortify the estate, know when something amounts to an endorsement deal and make choices that are going to extend, not compromise, your artist's legacy."