Music Ownership, Tweeting Tree, Video Game Music

How Can a Megastar like Taylor Swift Not Own the Recordings to Her Hits? (0:34) Guest: Erin Jacobson, The Music Industry Lawyer For a bit there it looked like Taylor Swift –one of the most powerful women in music –wouldn’t be allowed to perform some of her biggest hits at the American Music Awards on Sunday night. Swift’s enormous power does not, it turns out, extend to ownership of the songs that made her famous. The master recordings of those and dozens of other hits from the first decade of Taylor Swift’s career are owned by her former music label Big Machine Records, with whom Swift has some bad blood. A week ago, she posted on Twitter that Big Machine was refusing to let her perform a medley of her hits at the AMAs unless she promised not to rerecord all of her earlier music so she can have a copy that she owns. Swift’s legions of fans came to her defense online and Big Machine gave its permission for the performance. (Originally aired August 28, 2019) Tree That Tweets About Climate Change (19:39) Guest: Tim Rademacher, Harvard Forest Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University  Trees don’t speak, but there’s one in Harvard University’s forest that tweets. It’s a 100-year-old Red Oak tree sending regular updates with the handle @AWitnessTree on Twitter about how it’s holding up. A few days ago, the tree had a series of tweets about how much rain was falling. It’ll even answer if you tweet at it. (Originally aired September 23, 2019) Music Composition and Video Game Design (32:09) Guest: Winifred Phillips, Composer of Music for Video Games, Author of A Composer’s Guide to Game Music Composers of movie scores win Oscars for their brilliance. But if you want to know the truth, it’s a lot harder to compose the score to a video game, because it’s like a choose-your-own-soundtrack that responds to what the player does, while still setting the mood and sounding great. We’re hearing the main theme for the video game Assassin’s Creed Liberation, composed by Winifred Phillips. It’s currently being performed around