Copyright (Rights and Remuneration of Musicians, Etc.) Bill

Pete Wishart Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

It is a pleasure, as always, to follow the right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale). We have been together in so many of the various torturous debates about copyright reform, and I think we all still bear the scars of the Digital Economy Act 2017. I just hope that the record labels that have written to us so assiduously in the past few weeks sometimes remember what we did for them when the dark times started to descend on the sector and the industry in the early 2000s. Members such as the right hon. Gentleman, my friend the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) and several others across the House stood up for the music industry, made sure it was put back on a proper basis and created the political conditions for the industry to rise again out of the mess of digitisation. I just hope that is reflected and remembered in the course of this debate.

It is a pleasure to speak in the debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West on this excellent Bill. I have been waiting 20 years to see a Bill like this; it is great that we are now considering it. I have been a bandmate of the hon. Gentleman’s for about 20 years in MP4, the world’s only parliamentary rock band. Where he may be short in stature, he is mighty in musicality. If conditions had been just that little bit different years ago, when he was starting out rehearsing and starting to play the guitar, he could have been one of these featured artists earning so much money from being a successful recording artist. I recommend that colleagues listen to his solo album, “The Clown & The Cigarette Girl”, to hear the quality of his song writing. Lots of people ask, “What does this musical moonlighting mean for the future of MP4?” Well, we are the only rock band in the world that can sustain political differences as well as musical differences, so I think we can maybe just put up with a bit of musical moonlighting. The hon. Gentleman is Kevin Brennan, not Robbie Williams, so I think we will get by.

I am going to do something very unusual in the context of the past few weeks—something that on “Yes, Minister” might have been called “brave” or “courageous”. I want to talk about my “second job”, as several of my friends in the press have portrayed and described it. It is a second job that I have not done for 20 years, that I never spend any hours on, and that I cannot stop: because I am a former featured recording artist, I still receive royalties for my recorded works. After 20 years, I have to say that they have very much diminished, and with the onset of digitisation and streaming they have gone right down, but hey—they supplement the MP’s wage and I am grateful for them. I think I deserve them; I spent hours, months and years putting together those albums and that product, and I think it is right that they retain that value. They have to have intrinsic value.

That is what this is all about: the value of the imagination and the creative process, the virtue of the songwriting, the craft that goes into engineering and designing these wonderful products that are a narrative of our human experience and reflect our emotions. Where would we be without the songs? Where would we be without the songwriters? How would we enjoy our day-to-day life and activity without songs in our head, songs to enjoy, songs to listen to? If there is one thing this House can do, it is make sure that the people who produce and design these wonderful pieces of art should get proper remuneration and proper reward. If we can do anything in this House, surely we must reward our artists.

We are lucky in this country: we are particularly good at this. The UK dominates the world creative and artistic scene. It does not matter whether it is television, film or music—we are at the top. That is because we are very, very good at it, but we also have the political conditions to allow it. Copyright is a brilliant thing. It is about intellectual property—it is about making sure that that right is accepted and known. We have to make sure that we continue to adapt and develop the political infrastructure that lets talent and creativity thrive, develop, mature and express itself. That is one thing that we can do in this House. I really hope that we will look at the Bill today, see what we can do for our artists, and support it.

I signed a record contract. I was signed to two major record companies: I signed to Chrysalis Records in 1987, and it was taken over by EMI in the early 1990s. We did quite well during that period: we sold 1.5 million records, we had modest success in the UK with two top-five albums, and we had a couple of top-five albums in Scandinavia and Germany. I never earned a penny from any of my recordings. After selling all those records, I never received a penny. That is because as a contracted artist who had our rights given to one of the major record companies, we remain unrecouped, which means that we never repaid the investment from our record company. When the record company tired of us trying to secure that breakthrough and dropped us, we were dropped unrecouped, which meant that we no longer had a record contract and still owed money to the record label. We sold 1.5 million records!

Those were the good times: 1987 was the start of the CD revolution, when sales went through the roof and record companies lived in almost fantastic, egregious excess. They were amazing times, but even then we could not make money from records—never mind today, when streaming has come in and there are no longer physical sales. To give a sense and a feel of what this is all about, I remember when we were signed: we came into Heathrow airport and there was a battalion of limousines to drive us into the plush, swanky offices in Oxford Street. It was not that bad.

That was what it was like, and it is not much different today. To have success, an artist needs to achieve and secure album sales of about 200,000 or 300,000. It is at that point that they start to repay their debt to the record company. They then get to the place where royalties start to come in. During the ’80s and ’90s, royalties and sales came in and came in, and a lot of bands managed to get to that level and earn significant sums from their records. Those were really the good times.

I want to talk a little about the record contractual arrangements. I have no problem, difficulty or issue with the model that is in place: this idea that you are signed to a record company, and you give over your rights as an artist and creator to the record company in order for it to do the promotion and distribution. That is utterly fine and nobody really sees anything wrong with that. It will try to make to make sure that the contractual arrangement will monetise that for you—to sell it, promote it and make sure it happens.

Proceedings interrupted (Standing Order No. 11(4)).