Melody Maker

I learned today that Melody Maker, the UK music paper and one-time cultural icon that I used to work for, is to live again. Here's the story.

The Maker started life in 1926 and was finally shut down during the great magazine massacre of 2000 (it felt like one went every other week). I started there in the early 1990s and left in 1999. After I left, it became a small A4 format glossy in a last throw of the dice to try to revive its sales. The bullet in the head came courtesy of its IPC overlords and it had the ignominious fate of being 'incorporated' into the NME. The NME (they hated you calling it 'the NME', insisting that it's just 'NME') were on the 25th floor of King's Reach Tower, we were on the 26th. Never mind this geographical proximity, we were rivals.

Anyway, I seem to remember around 1998 there was much digruntlement among freelance writers and photographers (most positions were freelance) when IPC insisted we all sign new contracts which gave them 100 per cent rights over whatever we wrote or photographed, a move which overturned decades of established copyright ownership for freelancers. The deal had always been that IPC bought the rights to publish your words or pictures just the once, in the magazine that had commissioned it. So, if you happened to interview, say, Kurt Cobain, a few days before he killed himself, you may find that magazines all over the world would want to re-reprint said interview, and pay you. Same deal for photographers. Indeed, photographers have always seen their back catalogue of shots as a kind of de facto pension scheme, most of them being too feckless and drunk to actually have a proper pension scheme.

I caved and signed this draconian Big Brother contract, of course, but I have no idea whether the deal gave them the right to make everything I wrote for them after signing available online without giving me money. And a good deal of what I wrote came before the new contract.

Nothing has been revealed as to whether IPC intend to recompense freelancers for using their material in this way. If they think they can do it without paying us, hear this IPC: I am considering agitating my fellow former IPC-ites for some kind of class action.

Fuck yeah!

EDIT: If you want to see some of the cover stories I wrote for MM, have a look at the Martin Martin's On The Other Side film, it's just to the right of this post on the blog.