With the prospect of losing YouTube hanging over them, CCTV folded. After eight years of Muzzey checking his rights with ContentID and a year of engaging in conversation with CCTV, the network accepted a licensing deal Muzzey proposed. The musician won’t say how much it was for—“When you say you charged money for a fee, some people change their perspective,” he explains—only saying that all his deals with Chinese TV networks who have improperly used his music have been “pretty healthy settlements.” That’s not because he was charging a lot; Muzzey says he had set his fees at around $1,500 for a master and sync license for a TV show and Web streaming use. Rather, the deals with networks grew solely because the scale of the use of Muzzey’s music was so great.
“Some had used 25 episodes’ worth of music,” he says.
Muzzey’s saga with CCTV wasn’t the first time he had to fight for his right to be recognized as the creator of his music—and it won’t be the last. “I wish it was,” he says. “I’m f*cking exhausted.
“I’m so fortunate that I can make a living as a composer,” he explains. “I’ve only been doing it full-time proper for the last 11 years, and I get how completely lucky I am to be able to do that. I’ve had some good fortune along the way. But I did not expect that this would become 50 percent of my job and my life for the past seven years or so. I did not expect that.”
Muzzey had hoped that the advancement of technology might make the process easier over time, that tools like ContentID could streamline things for artists. But he says it hasn’t. “I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that this isn’t a blip: this is the new normal, and it’s getting worse, not better,” he says. “Part of that problem is that people like me don’t realize their stuff is out there or think I’m not famous, so how can it be possible, not realizing that if you have a Soundcloud page, your music has been ripped, put into torrents, probably in a TV show in China somewhere, and that’s just how that world works. You don’t realize it until it’s revealed to you layer by layer.”
So for now he continues, layer by layer, to peel back this all too common problem. Kerry Muzzey is a creator in an increasingly digital world, and that’s a place where copyright enforcement hasn’t quite come into bloom.
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