You Own My Songs

“Once you record it you have to just let it go, because at that point it doesn’t even belong to you . . . as it is now in the world and floating around.”
This is a quote from a video interview with Canadian singer/songwriter Dan Mangan that our friend Stylusboy introduced me to. He is referring to the process of songwriting and is basically saying that once a song is put out for all to hear, it is not no longer the property of the songwriter. The ownership passes to whoever's ears receive it. Mr Mangan uses the analogy of a piece of artwork, that once sold, is gone from the artist and never seen by him/her again and what happens to it will never be known to the artist. It may be passed down through generations or shipped across the world. Essentially it no longer belongs to the artist.

As a songwriter myself, it is a view that I found extremely interesting and one I had never considered before. . I spent last night pondering if what I considered to be ‘my songs’ were in fact not my songs anymore. Obviously in a legal sense the songs belong to me as I own the copyright. However we aren’t talking about binding contracts here, I believe we are discussing a ‘sense of ownership’. Previously I would have said that as I choose to use a particular chord sequence, rhythm, instrumentation and dynamics and the lyrics are from my own experiences/feelings, the song belongs to me. The listener may own a physical CD disk or MP3 file that is legally theirs; but the song is still mine.
Think of it like buying a holiday to Greece. You buy a ticket and that ticket it is physically yours. That ticket allows you to go on a journey to a part of the world, yet you don’t own that part of the world, you experience it. By flying to Greece you don’t take ownership of that country; it still belongs to the Greeks. The CD is the ticket and the music is the holiday. I will come back to this analogy later (stay with me it does make sense).

The more I thought about what Dan Mangan said, the more I started to change the way I thought about ‘ownership’ and more importantly what constitutes ownership.
Music is different to most things as songs themselves are not physical objects. You can’t hold a song in your hand. Yes, they can be put on a physical disk, piece of vinyl or stored on a physical hard drive; but that’s not what we are talking about really, we are talking about the song itself. So, if you can’t physically hold a song, how can you own it?
My interpretation of what Dan is saying is that as a listener you start to form your own meaning to someone else’s song. The song then has a different meaning to you than to anyone else. It may become a soundtrack to your summer, a song that evokes memories of a loved one, help you through a break-up, help you with a make-up, it may bring you closer to someone or it could simply brighten up a sad day. All of a sudden you have attached yourself to the song and you have a connection to it. Ultimately you feel that the song is yours because it is now personal to you, regardless of what feelings or memories I originally wrote about.
How many times have you heard someone say 'This is totally MY song' or a couple stating that it's 'OUR song'? Has ‘Ownership’ now passed to the listener? And does that song still belong to the songwriter? Yes & Yes!

After my night of wonder I have come to the conclusion that ownership doesn’t pass, it is shared. It is shared from the moment the songwriter puts it out to the world. I or any songwriter can’t really take credit for the things I outlined above ‘chord sequence, rhythm, instrumentation, dynamics’. We can take credit for how we use those things and how we fit them together but we didn’t create these things, they are all used in every song ever written. Even the lyrics, we didn’t create the words, we just put them in an order that represented the feeling or experience we wanted to express. Basically the finished product becomes the exact same thing to the songwriter as it is to the listener which is a non-physical piece of music that evokes his/hers own meanings/feelings/experiences. Although the original meaning/feelings/experiences contained in the song are put there by the songwriter, the listeners own meanings/feelings/experiences that he/she creates when listening to the song are as real or as valid as the songwriters original ones. I say ‘As real or as valid’ because they are not ‘more’ than the songwriters, which gets to my point. . . I believe that ownership of the song is now shared. It never passes away from the songwriter to the listener but rather shared between.

Going back to my holiday analogy, we can now look at it in a different light. Yes, the ticket is still physically yours but is that bit of Greece now yours? Yes, you have associated meaning/feelings/experiences with that bit of the world which makes it as much ‘yours’ as anyone else. You can’t alter or steal the land you have staked your flag in as that would be illegal, much like if you steal my lyrics or melodies that would be illegal (and I would hunt you down), but you now have a ‘sense of ownership’ with your special part of the world.

I guess what I am trying to conclude from my night of contemplation is that of near agreement with Dan Mangan. I do believe that once a song has been put out by a songwriter that the listener now has ownership of that song but I don’t believe he has sole ownership or that the songwriter must “let it go” as the ownership never passes, it is shared. The meanings/feeling/experiences are “as real or as valid” to them both. The beauty of music and it’s non-physical form, is that the slice of the ownership pie that is taken by each listener is never ending and no-ones slice gets any smaller.

Go forth and own more

Jonathan