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I couldn't imagine getting so caught up in one piece of work. I'd like to imagine I would have just immediately turned around and told everyone I was the guy who made the cover for Aqualung and focus my energy on the next project.
Also, it's very presumptive to assume I deserve a cut of your project just because it is successful. Not only do I claim my artwork had something to do with it (I doubt many people cared much about the album cover), but I can't give you one price and then extort you later because you actually have money now.
Others have already echoed my thoughts on copyright, so I won't repeat that, but I do want to raise one other point you touched upon:
> I doubt many people cared much about the album cover
Back in the old days of 12 inch records, people did care about album covers. I mean yeah, the music obviously matters more but album artwork was actually pretty important as well.
One of the things I feel we've lost with digital music is the entire presentation of a record. That's not to say things are worse now because we've gained stuff in return (eg music has never been so widely available as it is now). But album artwork (not just the front covers) did actually matter to a great many people.
That's the point: Artists at that time weren't protected enough to retain copyright over their work. They are now. It's not whether "you actually have money now", it's that "you're making money with something I created and I deserve a piece of that too"
If you sell a man or women a piece of artwork, yes they can put it up in their home and people can see it. If people take photos in front of it, well the photo is of the people and the art could be fair use context. If they take that piece of art and copy it and put it on a book cover .. now that's not right.
I've never actually bought art at an art fair, but I was with a friend who bought a ballet drawing once. I don't remember her signing anything to indicate use. She used her debit card and bought a painting which later hung up on her wall.
I feel like if this happened today, this wouldn't be acceptable. If I sell you a piece of art, you don't get the copyright for that art. You can sell the art like you sell socks, and the person who buys that art can resell it later. But you can't make copies and sell them as your own. Or stand in front of it, take a photo, and use it as a book cover claiming fair use.
If there is no contract, you haven't signed over your rights, and we should default on the side artists rights side of it.
The real distinction is between "paid upfront a specific price", known as "work for hire", versus a royalty-based system.
It's all about risk and option value. Most creative works never make a profit, so how much is a profit share worth? Most people need cashflow; if you need to pay rent at the end of the month, how much is a payout worth that's distributed over your life plus 70 years afterwards?
Aqualung was an old vinyl record my dad gave me, and I distinctly remember the cover.
He should have leveraged the success of the album to get high paid work.
Jim Carrey was offered $350K for Dumb and Dumber, which he turned down (he wanted $400K). Then when Ace Ventura became a surprise hit, the offer for Dumb and Dumber was raised to $7,000,000, which he took. He made only $350K for Ace Ventura, but that opened the door to a bigger payday.
Based on the success of Dumb and Dumber, he was the first actor ever to be paid $20M, for Cable Guy, a flop at the box office.
You get paid for /previous/ success, and that's what the author's dad should have learned.
Edit: removed mistaken reference to Liar Liar, thanks
Do markets for art work in the same way as markets for talent in film? To what extent does success in mass media illustration correspond to success in selling singular art objects?
They live in an UWS brownstone. Can't have had too much of a struggle through life.
I'm not quite sure there's any metric you could use to declare Liar Liar a "total flop", but sure.
I work in the realm of public art projects and thus have collaborated with a lot of artists, mostly painters and sculpters. I must say the success of any piece of artwork - especially the ones created with the public in mind - is not the work of a single man or woman, but the result of the collaboration of a team of professionals - designers, marketers, financiers, metal bashers, crane operators, all the way down to the assistant who helped review the contracts.
So a deal is a deal, if one agrees to the terms of a deal (oral or written), it must be honoured, otherwise there will be no collaboration. Imagine the marketer who helped putting the project on every headline turns around to ask for an extra cut of the success? Not possible, but he/she can certainly charge a higher fee for the next project.
Nowadays artists are much more educated about the value of copyright and we as art consultants/project coordinators help intermediate how deals are structured, so the value of the artist's work is properly recognised and rewarded.
As others have commented, success builds upon success, one must be able to see the bigger picture to be successful in any career pursued.
>So a deal is a deal, if one agrees to the terms of a deal (oral or written), it must be honoured
Sure thing. The deal was for an album cover. Perhaps $1500 in 1970s money is a fair sum for that, even for an iconic album.
Did the deal also include T-shirts, posters, and exclusive prints of the said cover signed by the band's front man?
That's where the contention is. Some people would say yes - work for hire is work for hire. Some people would say no. Pre-1978 copyright law is one side, later versions - on the other.
A deal must be honored - so it was, and then it was not.
This happened to an ex of mine. While we were together she was asked to do the album artwork for a top international-name stadium-filling band.
I persuaded her to charge £10k, which was around what she earned a year. She was going to charge much less. Neither of us considered future revenue from licensing or merchandise, so it was signed as a one-off work-for-hire deal. The manager still grumbled about how pushy she was being.
The imagery has appeared on countless merch items since. It’s hard to estimate the economic value, but it was surely a lot more than £10k.
She bought herself a new mattress and took a couple of weeks off.
Unlike OP’s artist, she never expected more. Creatively, it was a bit of a side project. But the truth is the band could have paid £5k or £10k a year in licensing fees without even noticing, so there’s something rather sad about it all.
> The imagery has appeared on countless merch items since. It’s hard to estimate the economic value, but it was surely a lot more than £10k.
You get paid based on the cost of replacing your work with someone else's work, not on the value of your work product.
But even if you want to argue for paying people based on value produced, your ex didn't produce that value. It came from the band. People buy band merch because they like the band, not because they like the art.
The aqualung cover image would be basically worthless right now if the artist had kept it while some other image went on the cover of aqualung.
I think the article artist didn't expect more at the time. The "haunting" implies that in hindsight they believed they should have charged more, but that's not really how things work.
My guess is that Ian Anderson’s making up a new backstory is probably what fueled the obsession.
This is such an odd story.
The guy sold a painting knowing it was going to be used by a rock band for an album and took a one time payment.
Then he spends the next several decades complaining about it, so much so that his son tries to extract some sort of narrative about the whole process to support his fathers position.
In some ways I can actually relate, so perhaps I’m projecting my own hurt from lack of Justice... but in this case the guy was paid and it was only after it was successful did he start wishing he got more money.
I have trouble feeling bad for the guy. He was paid what he had agreed to.
Yes, with no contract, it was work for hire.
And it's understandable that he feels bad about it. So I do feel bad for him. We've all made mistakes.
Given the headline, I had expected more than grief about no royalties. I mean, that is a disturbing old man.
Easy thing to say. But imagine Zuckerberg had hired you to code the first version of his site, paid you a few thousand bucks, and then he went on to be one of the richest men in America?
We here in SV have evolved a culture and a set of business practices that do a much better job of compensating us fairly. We make good cash money, and we tend to get a share of the success when things get big. It's not like we as individuals were clever enough to negotiate all of the details; it's a system mostly other people worked out over time.
But we're very lucky in that people with our talents and skills are still much rarer than business types would like. That's not true with artists, and the music industry's default practices, especially then, were generally shitty. There's no reason this guy shouldn't get as fair a shake as we do.
(And before anybody has a personal story of not getting a fair shake: yes, that sucks, which is exactly why you should want to see systemic changes that minimize that happening to others.)
This artist created something that got widely recognized, and the genesis of it (he alleges) was widely misrepresented by both Ellis and Anderson. Also, he got paid squat compared to what the album generated in sales. Unless you are Spock from Star Trek, you are going to have some feelings of frustration, indignation, and envy from that experience.
I agree. On the other hand you have artists being paid in company stock which they decide not to sell[1]. Hindsight is 20/20.
There are certain revenue expectations in mind for any project. Any time something is wildly successful beyond that, I think everyone that made it deserves to split at least a few percent of the income.
"consummating the deal with nothing more than a handshake"
Seriously, just a handshake. So fleeting. So trivial. It's just a gesture, after all.
I feel bad for the guy. The album was pretty successful...
The nature of employment is that we produce works for hire. I don't see any exploitation here.
Do album cover artists ever get windfalls from successful? Unlikely I think, unless of course they were well known artists who insisted on royalties.
The album would have been similarly successful with any cover or no cover.
Would they still be selling t-shirts and posters of any cover or no cover and pocketing that money?
Not surprised, the stories of artists signing for X and getting never properly compensated (either for X or X-extended-to-anything-else) are countless.
And there's little you can do, unless you can nail down the exact culprit to a specific court.
For example: Apple is selling my music, without my consent or without paying due royalties. If I go to them they say "we pay royalties to the distributor", the distributor says "we only deal with labels" and my label has gone bust. Another label now has the rights. They don't know me. They don't have a contract with me. They have a contract with a deceased label that sold them rights they never acquired. So... yeah, it's never going to be fixed.
> They have a contract with a deceased label that sold them rights they never acquired
Surely, if that can somehow be proven in court, those rights would become void and you should get your music back. I know this might not be practical (the court system is not cheap, in most countries), but it's not a principle set in stone that "people get screwed".
The whole article seems to vastly overstate how important the cover art was to the financial success of the album. People rarely buy t-shirts of an album cover because they really like the artwork in isolation; it's very often because it reminds them of the songs on the album.
There is a self-enforcing cycle.
A good album sells merchandise, which quite often is using imagery from the album front. T-shirts, posters, ... you name it.
Yes, the merchandise is bought as a reminder of a good experience but once it's out in the open, it becomes a form of brand advertising. Familiarity breeds interest (as well as contempt), and interest generates sales.
NB. Unrelated to the other part of your comment - I would happily buy a shirt with The Division Bell's cover even if I didn't like the album. There are limits, though. I'm NOT paying £75 for a cycling jacket with that image - such a thing was available in the V&A exhibition.
Metal album cover or band logo t-shirts were a huge fad in Japan amongst young people, even those who didn’t like or know about the music. A metal head friend of mine said that he finally understood cultural appropriation!
>But dad’s earnings had a hard cap. In 1971, Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Records, paid him a flat $1,500 fee for the three paintings which would comprise the album’s artwork, consummating the deal with nothing more than a handshake. No written contractual agreement was drawn up, and, much to his eventual dismay, nor was any determination made about future use.
Well, if he got his $1500 he shook hands on (and which seem a good amount for the time, heck even today an artist can be paid less for an album cover), then he doesn't exactly has any legs to stand on.
key part:
"[A lawyer specializing in this sort of law] explained that when dad and Chrysalis came to a handshake agreement, as long as the paintings were originally considered “works made for hire,” the copyright for the paintings always belonged to Chrysalis, thanks to the 1909 Copyright Act. Copyright laws were amended in 1978, making it more difficult for commissioned works to qualify as “works made for hire,” especially in instances where a contract was less-than-specific. Unfortunately, the courts have heavily favored publishers for cases that dated prior to 1978, which means dad missed the cutoff by a scant seven years."
What a strange article. He was paid a flat fee for some work and appears to have got greedy and bitter when the album was successful.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2018/05/on-behalf-of...
"Is it ever okay to sell the rights to your work?
Milton Glaser was paid about $2,000 in expenses to create the I Love NY logo, one of the iconic marketing images of its decade. He later said, "I was very happy to do it. I was very happy about the consequences.”
Carolyn Davidson originally made $35 for designing the swoosh that Nike made famous."
Raphael Ravenscroft, who played the famous saxophone parts on Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street.", was paid only 27 pounds... and that cheque allegedly bounced.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures...
> the two men hammered out the contours of a handshake deal: For $1,500 (approximately $10,130 in 2018 dollars) dad would deliver three paintings.
> In Ellis’ Midtown office, the last painting was delivered. Ellis cut him a check and said something to the effect of, "Oh thanks very much, these are great,” dad recalls.
Am I missing something here? Seems obvious why lawyers won't take on this guy since 1) there was no contract and 2) the no-contract agreement was not broken.
This is a case of 'contract regret'. If there was a legal case then for sure it would have been litigated and he might have won but as it is all that you could say is that it is really sorry that he got very much hung up on that one painting when instead he could have used its success to significantly raise his prices for other commissioned works with hopefully better contracts.
On another note: whoever made Jethro Tull's cover for that particular album could have felt that way because it was their music that people were buying, not the album cover.
> In 1971, Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Records, paid him a flat $1,500 fee for the three paintings which would comprise the album’s artwork
It is too bad he didn't negotiate a royalty agreement, but then they might not have given him the work, either.
FWIW if he had invested $1000 in the S&P 500 on January 1 of 1972, that investment would be worth about $100K today, according to some online calculators that I tried.
Granted, investing is a lot easier, now that online brokerages exist. It was probably not something that many artists did back in the '70s.
It's funny that the record industry trots out the line that 'artists deserve to be paid for their work', while trying to stop teenagers downloading...
Does anyone know of a case where the album cover artist or photographer was given an ongoing cut of royalties?
I like the artist and the cover art but nothing illegal or particularly unethical took place here. The attitude of those stating otherwise is reflective of our time... break the law to impose some arbitrary and often misinformed notion of justice on the world
Lots of famous songwriters failed to work publishing rights into their (paper) contracts too. Life is a beach for those who don't know their options.
Why is this even a submission on hacker news?
Seems like the artist should have negotiated for a piece of the residuals but now regrets that...
Alternative title: "Man at end of his career realises value of lawyers"
That animated section divider nearly made me drop my phone, thought it was a bug.
never seen it before, never heard it before. I'm pretty sure that their case is as solid as the cult status they claim this pice has.