Part 2 of our interview with Jennifer Marr on her new initiative, The Legal Centre for Dance Music, and how electronic musicians can access free professional legal advice.
In Part 1 of our interview with Jennifer Marr, we explored her new initiative, The Legal Centre for Dance Music, and how it supports musicians. We also discussed some of the most common legal questions she encounters. In Part 2, we dive deeper into these topics, addressing more key questions and insights from Jennifer and focus around when to work with a lawyer or to seek advice.
Maeve: How can you tell when it’s the right time to seek legal support from an entertainment lawyer?
Jennifer: If you have a lawyer, a manager, or an agent, you should view these roles as advisors, but they should never push the artist into making any decisions. Education is a tool against being taken advantage of. When an artist is educated about their business they can also have a back and forth and a dialogue with their team and people they’re negotiating with as well.
A good time to seek legal services, as a DJ/Producer, is if you’re releasing recorded music frequently with collaborators (especially if you are self-releasing and essentially running your own label), or if you’re in that “empire building mode” of creating multiple verticals (like starting to incorporate merch and brand deals into your strategy).
A good time to seek legal services, as a DJ/Producer, is if you’re releasing recorded music frequently with collaborators
How do you build a strong community and connect with the right professionals to collaborate with?
There isn’t one formula that works for everyone. If you can find a lawyer who works on a commission rather than the hourly fees, who’s willing to invest in you and be a general counsel for your business, that can be a really strong move. If you don’t feel as confident in your project management abilities, or think that you really need someone who’s also helping to hustle opportunities, it can often be advisable to get a manager first. Managers usually have a strong network of lawyers they like in their referral network that they’ll use for their roster.
Having business and legal tools that build financial stability and protect them from appropriation is especially important in electronic dance music. History is written by the victors, and a lot of time in the history of electronic music, those victors have been, for better or worse, powerful majority groups appropriating underground dance culture without giving them due credit or due compensation. It’s not enough to build a sustainable culture, it needs to go hand in hand with literacy and education.
Having business and legal tools that build financial stability and protect them from appropriation is especially important in electronic dance musi
How do your clients typically find you, and how do they ensure they’re reaching the right type of lawyer for their needs?
The biggest green flag is to make sure that they care about you and understand you, especially if you’re at the stage where you’re a developing artist, and you’re looking for someone to really partner with you and help you and understand the space you want to be in.
There’s always such a big focus on how you can do that by playing out live, the big DJ tour or merch, but building up a valuable catalogue of your music can lead to as big of a payday as a big headlining gig at EDC. It takes time and it takes intention, building up your catalogue value through these methods is, in my opinion, a better, more stable way to build a life based on your music.
Find out more about The Legal Center for Dance Music. Find Jennifer Marr on Instagram. Register for the newsletter here.
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