You absolutely can record your concerts, Scott, and you can sell them to anyone you want to.  You just have to pay the appropriate royalties to the copyright holders.

 

Mechanical rights involve a compulsory license in the U.S., and the royalty rate is set by statute, so everybody has to charge the same amount (currently 9.1 cents per song, per recording).  The easiest way to get the license in place is on the website for The Harry Fox Agency (www.songfile.com). With their page, the entire process happens online, bills to your credit card, and you're good to go.  There are two disadvantages, however.  First, the site charges the ridiculously high fee of $15 per song - a real barrier if you're dealing with only a few dozen recordings.  Secondly, there are several publishers - particularly of choral music - who are not represented by Harry Fox.

 

To avoid these two situations, you can request the licenses directly through the publishers.  Since I've been doing this for about ten years, I have contact information for the rights administrators at most of the choral publishing houses.  Feel free to drop a line to me (ttropp(a)u.northwestern.edu) if you need help.  Otherwise, visit each publisher's web site and find their copyright links.

 

Good luck!

 

Tom Tropp

SoundByte Studios

Northwestern University

You titled this "legal issues" but didn't really ask any legal questions. As Tom mentions, the legal end is pretty straightforward. They can't deny you a mechanical license if you serve appropriate notice and pay the statutory fee. Typically the mechanical license costs around $1 for each CD made, so take that into account in your pricing.

 

As for whether it's practical as a fundraiser, which is what you seem to be asking, I'd guess you wouldn't really clear that much income from it. It's up to you whether a couple hundred bucks is worth the effort. I like the idea of involving your sound recording class, though -- it gives them a concrete, real project to work on rather than something artificial.

 

There's also a possible political problem in selling a recording of the band and orchestra to benefit your choir program -- it's not clear from your message whether you're talking about that or making a new recording of your choirs -- I wouldn't do this without having the band director on board.

Scott,

 

Tom and Allen are both correct. But you wondered whether you could use CDs for fundraising. My own experience suggests that the best answer is "maybe."

 

My university show group, once I got it organized and things running smoothly, started making an annual album. (LPs in the early '80s; the LPs and cassettes; then cassettes only one year; then cassettes and CDs, once the per-unit price of CDs--which was ridiculous when there was high demand and not much competition--came down to a reasonable level.) We would have our recording sessions (in a professional studio) in November, send our master tapes and artwork off before Christmas, and have our new album in time for our spring touring season.

 

We basically used them as souvenir albums, selling them at concert appearances. My goal was to make enough income from them to fund the following year's recording and manufacturing costs, and we managed to do that very well. But raising excess funds? No. Never happened, and in my opinion not very likely to happen.

 

One factor is what you will charge. My students always approached it from the point of view of "what would they be willing to pay." That's obviously not a realistic business strategy, because you have to cover the amortized cost of recording and production before you can start looking at profit. We found a happy medium.

 

Tom's disgust with the Harry Fox Agency charging a minimum fee (equal to a minimum number of units manufactured and distributed) is sort of ill founded. First, it used to be a lot more. Second, they instituted the minimum fee in order to pay for the cost of opening a new account. After all THEY'RE running a business, too. Of course you can contact individual publishers (assuming that they are the copyright owners), as Tom suggests, but I'd suggest planning a year ahead because it will take time, and in the end more publishers than not will send you to Harry Fox anyway, because THEY don't want the expense and bother of opening an account for you!

 

And of course for the younger generation, even the concept of an album--or of buying an album--is pretty old fashioned, since they've gotten used to downloading individual songs that they want, not taking someone else's idea of what they should buy. Which could actually reduce your manufacturing cost, if all you wanted to do was to produce downloadable MP3s instead of physical albums.

 

All the best,

 

John