In fact, that right already exists (in the US), it's Section 203 - artists can terminate their copyright grants after 35 years after the publishing date.

That's quite insightful, now if only after 50 years it would be terminated, regardless of whether the artist is dead or alive. If they want to give them a renewed copyright grant or something that's another story, and it should end the moment the artist dies. Till death do us part indeed.

Copyright treats music, lyrics, and recording as separate entities. The recording of a song is a derivative work of music and lyrics. I'd strongly favor shortening the copyright on audio recordings, while keeping the copyright for music and lyrics strictly with the composer and writer, respectively, for a longer term.

The same could happen for video recordings and their screenplays.

I think maybe the "works for hire" regime needs to be changed such that employees own the copyright to their own contribution to a work, and the employer just gets an automatic perpetual license only to works created while on the job, exclusive only as long as the employee remains employed, and the final aggregated commercial product is a derivative work from many sources. So if you can reassemble the same team of actual humans as the original, you can re-do the work of putting their contributions together, and acquire a new copyright on a new aggregate that could be nearly identical to the older aggregate.

So you only hold a monopoly on a movie as long as the majority of key contributors in that long credits scroll at the end continues to work for you. If you fire too many people after production wraps up, particularly the script writers and scene planners and digital modelers, they could get together, compare notes, and do a shot-for-shot remake at a fraction of the budget, because their part of the work has already been done, and you lost exclusivity when you fired them.

That would surely invoke a new form of Hollywood Accounting, but at least it would encourage creators to create works with some durance in preference to consume-once ephemera. And you wouldn't end up with great artists in poverty even as their works make their current owners heaps of money.

It is still important work to turn an artwork into a viable commercial product, and to assemble and manage teams of artists to great something together greater than what could be produced individually, but that added value should not make the middleman the sole gatekeeper for the source works, forever.

> Artists from what I recall make more money selling merchandise and doing concerts

True, because every ass and his dog pirates music, thus the income from selling music is severely diminished. The amount of time it takes to produce/compose/record etc. music is not exactly trivial, and if you have to tour constantly in order to be able to pay the bills, then finding time and energy to create some new music to perform whilst on tour becomes quite problematic. Your "most artists don't care" statement is a crock of shit! Perhaps large established artists may not care so much, but if you're talking about "most artists" then they do care that income from their craft is being denied to them.

Can you provide some proof that "pirating" (I hate that word) had severely diminished sold copies? And I don't mean all those "studies" based on the false premise that downloaded records are lost sales.

Other commenters have mentioned about how pirating can increase exposure and in fact increase sales - Breaking Bad (which isn't music) is one big name example of this happening.

In any case, "album sales" is a very one dimensional view of the world. Even if fans were to pirate music, there is no way to pirate live performances - and exposure is one such way to boost sales of live performances so lost sales in albums is a very narrow slice of the entire ecosystem.

No I cannot, but conversely can you prove that is has not?

All I can proffer is anecdote that as bandwidth and the ubiquity of Internet increased over the years, the sales of music via the label I'm involved with diminished. All the while our artists and the label itself became more and more popular, so it seems entirely counter inuitive that sales should have been dropping.

I don't buy music from labels or online shops. I go to either an artists website or somewhere the artists will directly get the money from it or i'll buy albums from shows. I've probably paid for more music in the last few years than I did most of the time as a teenager. I feel a lot better giving my money to people who are more directly involved in creating the music than large companies that produce albums for them. Hell i've even bought some new recently produced vinyl albums in the last couple years. When I was young I refused to use places like hmv so all I did was either pirate or buy music from shows. Now i've replaced pirating with buying music online.

The thing is there's just so much music now. The artists you represent may be more popular but there's so much more competition for people's money. There's music i've bough I enjoy from artists whose shows i'll probably never get to see. I spend a lot of time listening to concerts and such these artists freely post online, i'm enjoying their music, legally, but I haven't paid for it.

There are a lot of things contributing.to lower album sales. Piracy, while i'm sure contributes doesn't seem to be the biggest problem. Plus i've been hearing this since I was a kid and cassette tapes were being blamed for killing the music industry because people could just record anything they want off the radio or a friend's cassette so album sales were dropping.

Labels get their money regardless of where you buy it from if they have a stake in the album/band.

I would bet the drop in album sales is more likely due to the rise of Spotify and other streaming services than piracy.

This. In fact researchers a few years back came to the conclusion that piracy increased sales due to easier discovery + exposure.

It is now, but the drop in record sales started before Spotify — it started with Napster and similar services. Spotify grew from a market reaction to those sales lost due to theft.

CD sales have fallen since 2000. Spotify, in your example, came out 8 years later.

https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/

Conversely, Napster was released in 1999.

Illegal downloads surely had an impact in the 2000s era, but I think by now the amount of freely streamable content is by far the largest factor.

Unlikely - streaming expanded the market for music.

I recall a report that showed that p2p networks acted primarily like a broadcast medium, which tuned to the most popular works.

The entire free content model has arisen because of tacit acknowledgement of that fact.

Youtube, hell everyone, applies those lessons today.

And, as I pointed out originally, there was about an 8 year gap between demise of album sales and the prominence of streaming.

The album is dead. Paid streaming is booming.

Albums aren't dead. Luckily, I can stream those too.

It's just more convenient. "Hey Siri, play the latest album by X" still works. Thank God.

Albums aren't dead for artists that are capable of making more than one good song.

Albums are only dead for artists who have to use filler to make the one hit song they managed to come up with fill a CD.