Termination Of a Record Deal

Unfortunately, you can’t just terminate your recording contract unless you have an extremely good legal reason, such as impossibility or performance or frustration of purpose.

If you are terminally ill or there’s some other circumstance that prevents you from fulfilling your contract, you should able to get out of it. Also, if there’s civil unrest, war, or some other natural disaster that prevents the contract from being enforced, you could possibly get out of it. However, the courts are very reluctant to let someone out of a signed agreement, especially if they were advised to have adequate representation before signing it.

In fact, your recording contract will probably state that you’ve had the opportunity to seek legal representation, and that you are entering into the contract of your own free will and without any duress. Once you sign your name, getting out of the contract will be very difficult. Even if you do, you probably won’t own the masters to the songs that you recorded with the label, and you may not be allowed to record for a set period of time after the termination of the contract.

If you can get out of your contract, you need to know what rights, if any, you have concerning your music, brand, trademarks, etc. The more rights you assign to the label, the less likely you will be able to take those rights with you when you leave. As for your copyrights, if you have signed a work-for-hire agreement, you will never get back the rights to your masters.

If you take into consideration all the pros and cons of deal points that were listed earlier, you can see that a major record deal is not always the best deal for the artist. I don’t want you get the wrong impression or think that I look at major record labels as the enemy. In fact, quite the opposite is true. They definitely have their place. But I do wish that they would be a little more creative with the choices they offer, put out some different music, and be a little more respectful of the artists and producers who actually put money in their pockets. It sometimes feels like the accountants and lawyers are making the creative decisions about what we hear, and sometimes the cookie-cutter mentality that seems to so prevalent in music today makes for limited choices when it comes to what you hear on the radio. I also wish that radio wasn’t so corporative and overcommercialized, and that more independent records were played so that our musical landscape was as diverse as the actual music that is being made throughout this great country. However, as long as legalized payola in the form of independent promoters exists, there won’t be much change on the regular airwaves anytime soon. Fortunately, there’s always the Internet, and satellite radio is coming on strong, so at least there are new avenues for consumers, artists, and independent record labels to explore.