Hoping for someone smarter than me to explain how this works exactly. I noticed that every time they play the final countdown it seems to cost over 100,000
Yet when you watch UFC they use licensed music all the time for walkout. They even use songs like zombie, which should be expensive.
Even for metallica they used to use that song all the time for Baseball games as well as ECW so why are these guys all able to do it yet The final countdown seems to be an aberration?
Is it because UFC isn’t considered entertainment? Because I can’t imagine those fighters are paying that money every time they walk out.
For ECW I have the answer. They just stole the music. Heyman has admitted in past interviews they never got permission or paid rights fees from Metallica or Pantera. And considering how happy Metallica was to lawyer up in the 90’s Heyman is very lucky they never got sued for using Enter Sandman.
That is one of the reasons why all the rebroadcasts of ECW on the network had to have the music scrubbed.
I remember reading or hearing somewhere that where it makes a difference is when it’s shown once on a live show vs being put on DVDs, video games, a streaming service etc.
ECW also never (or rarely) had the music as a dedicated part of the sound mix for TV. It was just played in the Arena and could be heard through crowd mics, etc.
I don’t think that automatically makes it "free’ – at least not if challenged in court. But as long as the venue had a Public Performance License, it’s kind of the same thing as playing copyrighted music at a baseball game and hearing it on TV. If Metallica really wanted to sue ECW, they probably could have won on the grounds that Enter Sandman is being used as an integral part of the marketing of the Sandman character (or “Deep Purple and Shane Douglas”, to use a less blatant example). But the above is probably what ECW would have argued.
You know, now that you mention it, other sports like MLB use all sorts of “walk up” music for baseball players, but the song usually can’t be heard clearly on the broadcast. Maybe that is the difference?
Oversimplifying things, but a lot of the world’s music catalog is either sold to or controlled by larger publishing entities, or artists/labels who control their own publishing lease their rights to those entities. Basically, this puts all of that music into a gigantic pool of music which entities like sports teams, restaurants, etc., pay an annual fee to (or just fail to do so in the case of a lot of smaller businesses like ECW) to be able to play/broadcast that music. Residuals are paid out by the companies controlling those larger pools to the artists involved. How much this costs depends on whether music is just being played at casual conversation levels in a restaurant, whether it’s being played loudly for tens of thousands of sports fans, and whether or not said music will be picked up/rebroadcast, etc. Some artists/labels refuse to do this and instead retain certain publishing rights or total control over their own publishing and broadcast rights, like Europe evidently has. This means that you’re less likely to hear their catalog out at a bar that uses a licenced music service, but also means that when someone like TK -REALLY- wants to use their music, they can name their price.
Somewhat related. The reason Punk is using a re-recorded version of “Cult of Personality” is so the royalties can go to Living Colour and not the label that owns the original.