For an independent artist, navigating the library acquisition process can be as challenging as self-releasing music: The letter of the law itself is byzantine and the marketplace is dominated by a handful of media corporations, distributors, and proprietary platforms that can make simply accessing potential customers logistically and economically out of reach.
Fortunately, one of the librarians Crichlow emailed was Kathleen DeLaurenti, director of Peabody’s Arthur Friedheim Library. Earlier this year, DeLaurenti co-authored a Model Purchase and License Agreement for Digital Scores with three colleagues from across the country: Dave Hansen, executive director of the non- profit Authors Alliance; Peter Routhier, policy counsel at the Internet Archive; and Laura Williams, head of Duke University’s Music Library.
This basic template, released online by the Music Library Association, is a relatively straightforward but potent tool. It’s the first document to allow libraries to collect born-digital publications from independent composers. “This is the first document since the introduction of the iPod that spells out the agreement between buyer and creator,” DeLaurenti says. She notes that many music publishers won’t make e-scores available to libraries and even when they do, libraries don’t own them.
“This is the first document since the introduction of the iPod that spells out the agreement between buyer and creator.”
For an independent artist, navigating the library acquisition process can be as challenging as self-releasing music: The letter of the law itself is byzantine and the marketplace is dominated by a handful of media corporations, distributors, and proprietary platforms that can make simply accessing potential customers logistically and economically out of reach.
Fortunately, one of the librarians Crichlow emailed was Kathleen DeLaurenti, director of Peabody’s Arthur Friedheim Library. Earlier this year, DeLaurenti co-authored a Model Purchase and License Agreement for Digital Scores with three colleagues from across the country: Dave Hansen, executive director of the non- profit Authors Alliance; Peter Routhier, policy counsel at the Internet Archive; and Laura Williams, head of Duke University’s Music Library.
This basic template, released online by the Music Library Association, is a relatively straightforward but potent tool. It’s the first document to allow libraries to collect born-digital publications from independent composers. “This is the first document since the introduction of the iPod that spells out the agreement between buyer and creator,” DeLaurenti says. She notes that many music publishers won’t make e-scores available to libraries and even when they do, libraries don’t own them.
“It was great to see this specific kind of license because it is the future,” Crichlow says, adding that she appreciates its simplicity in spelling out exactly what her score is going to be used for: inclusion in a performing arts institution’s music library for study and performance. “This is how everyone is selling music now—through PDFs, through digital formats. And it’s important to get the word out on how you can do this as an independent composer who doesn’t have a management system or a big publishing company supporting them.”
Peabody acquired Crichlow’s Vairo Boulevard (for tuba, loop pedal, and produced track), which is named after a street close to Penn State where she and Gretchen Renshaw James, her then tubist/conductor roommate, discussed coming out and being queer during grad school. Crichlow recalled those conversations when James commissioned a piece from her years later. She says she was inspired by Black queer house and 1980s dance music artists. “They created space for people to express themselves and be safe with music and community. We wanted to have those ideas come together in the tuba world, which is seen as a very male- and white-dominated field, because there are Black and queer people in this medium and we’ve always been here.”
The Need for a New Model
The rise of digital books, movies, music, and video games created new licensing models, which cover everything from a song that is downloaded to your smartphone to how libraries acquire and share e-books. The prevailing business model used to protect digital intellectual property is Digital Rights Management, which prevents unauthorized access to, and use of, copyrighted digital works. You can’t watch a movie you buy licensed through Amazon on Apple TV, just as you can’t loan that movie to a friend the way you might a DVD.
These new licensing models also produce different distribution models, which, in turn, impacts who gets paid, for what, when that licensed media is consumed. Libraries, in our digital era, want to protect the online rights they’ve always enjoyed—collecting, preserving, and lending materials, including to other libraries—for their patrons.
For example, in 2020, UCLA’s Music Inquiry and Research Librarian Matthew Vest created an open- access collection at the university to house a broad selection of student, faculty, and university-commissioned digital scores, and those from contemporary composers in general. Since its creation, the Contemporary Music Score Collection has been viewed more than 152,000 times with users worldwide downloading more than 67,000 items.
Vest says that music and media librarians have long faced a challenge of acquiring digital-only content. The license model preferred by film studios and book publishers is increasingly becoming favored by music publishers, he notes, which can be financially challenging and impractical. “If we think about an e-book, an educational use of it is not terribly different than a physical book in some ways,” he says. “But the use of a score is different than a book. And if we take the licensing model of a sound recording or a film and apply it to scores, which is really what the industries writ large are offering us, the licensing models don’t reach the need that we have within collections in academic and public libraries, which are going to be used for performances.”
For example: A digital score for which a library has a single-use license can’t be checked out by multiple students taking the same class, even if the item is put on reserve. DeLaurenti notes that at the Friedheim Library, when a professor reserves a score that the library can only acquire in digital form, student workers print and bind those works into physical score books to put on reserve shelves . . . that students then pull, scan, and email to themselves to be fed into whatever musical e-reader they use.
Empowering Creators
The Model Purchase and License Agreement for Digital Scores that DeLaurenti and colleagues crafted is a 322- word template that allows composers and a client to agree on a fee and license terms, with suggested language clearly outlining purchase, rights of use, authorized users, and uses. This accessible simplicity is what makes it so versatile and vital, Crichlow says, adding that she’s going to start using it as the contract template for other projects, such as writing scores for client’s YouTube videos and podcasts.
Simply stating the relationship between creator and client gives independent artists a flexible tool that they previously didn’t have. Music scores typically enter a library collection the same ways as books, journals, and audio and video recordings do: through agreements made with publishers. And just as there are but a handful of large media companies responsible for the largest market share of commercial movies, albums, and books, there are a small number of music score publishers around the world, and there are proprietary services that deal with their digital scores.
This model license, DeLaurenti notes, isn’t necessarily for those artists who already have a publisher working to distribute their work to all the various streaming and retail platforms and libraries that people use to find, hear, and study music. The model license is for anybody who doesn’t have the access or resources to participate in that part of the industry.
“One of the exciting things for me about this model is that music librarians have been waiting for opportunities that empower the communities that we care about,” Vest says. “We want to empower our composers and creators. And I think this model license is really a piece of that.”
DeLaurenti and her co-creators intend for the model license to be just that: a starting point that librarians can share with their purchasing departments and customize it for their specific needs. How libraries, archives, and other stewards of cultural history acquire digital materials can serve to further their missions: In this case, bringing into the library and conservatory contemporary works and those that historically have been excluded. And while the reasons for those exclusions can be due to the systemic biases of discriminatory policies, they can also happen when technological advancements produce moments when documentation doesn’t keep pace with creation.
“We want to empower our composers and creators. And I think this model license is really a piece of that.”
“One of the exciting things for me about this model is that music librarians have been waiting for opportunities that empower the communities that we care about,” Vest says. “We want to empower our composers and creators. And I think this model license is really a piece of that.”
DeLaurenti and her co-creators intend for the model license to be just that: a starting point that librarians can share with their purchasing departments and customize it for their specific needs. How libraries, archives, and other stewards of cultural history acquire digital materials can serve to further their missions: In this case, bringing into the library and conservatory contemporary works and those that historically have been excluded. And while the reasons for those exclusions can be due to the systemic biases of discriminatory policies, they can also happen when technological advancements produce moments when documentation doesn’t keep pace with creation.
Consider the cluster of Florence Price manuscripts found at the late composer’s summer home in 2009: The old paper scores ignited an ongoing rediscovery and reappraisal of her formidable art.
All art isn’t so lucky. Some 75% of original silent-era films have been lost, with only 14% of the 10,919 silent films released by major studios existing in their original formats, according to a 2013 Library of Congress report. That’s due to many reasons, including studios tossing them out, but also due to archivists not figuring out how to preserve things as fast as filmmakers were experimenting with making images.
So while musical scores have been a stable print item for several hundred years, digital scores are becoming a favored format for younger artists, and libraries currently have limited means to collect and preserve the growing, diverse output of a generation of increasingly entrepreneurially minded self-publishers. “We librarians think a lot about current access,” Vest says. “But we also need to think about preserving the cultural heritage of our moment, which comes into play in more than just music scores if we think about online video and audio content.”
“The central mission of a library is to preserve and provide access to our cultural heritage,” DeLaurenti says. “This license ensures that we can continue to do this vital work while ensuring that we expand the diversity of voices in our collection.”
