New single - Update #2

It’s a busy time of year for most people and especially so for Empires That Dance as we continue to work on our next release. Most things are within our control but some things remain firmly in the hands of others. I am of course talking about obtaining permission to release the new single as a download/audio stream. There is a myriad of complexities linked with record companies we have to consider and that is where we are at present. This is all down to who actually owns the rights to a song. If I am being honest there were about 3 or 4 musical ideas that George and I had been contemplating over the summer. One of these has been in development for about 4 or 5 years and I hope it develops into a release one day. But the new single really did happen quite quickly. So at this stage the legal process started by going to the original release, identifying the publisher and asking questions. Sounds simple? If only it was. Over the years record companies have been sold, merged, reinvented and the copyright/sampling rights are part of this process. Fortunately some of the staff have remained and building a relationship with previous releases does help. So in the summer I was confident that we had everything ready for when our final mix was complete in order to obtain permission for release. Typically in the space of a few months one of the businesses owning part of the copyright/sampling rights was sold. But as ever the contacts we have were more than generous with pointing us in exactly the right direction. This last week we have been in discussion with 2 major record labels and they are listening to our track, double checking for use of any original samples (there are none but they need to be sure) and noting our track arrangement. This gives us an incredible nervous buzz and we are confident permission should be granted soon. Once we get permission we then publish and we hope to publish very soon.

But that’s another story!

Andy