4 - The Performance-Commodity at Work, 1833–1911

Summary

Performance rights affected theater and music not only by bringing artists to court but also in the daily operatin of the theatrical and musical industries. This chapter examines the law’s effects on these complex markets. The music industry, structured primarily around sheet music sales, fervently resisted performance rights until the advent of sound recording technologies reshaped incentives for music publishers and composers alike. Theater artists were more eager to realize income from performance rights but struggled to establish new standards and to collect fees. The new laws also altered the value of published plays, which reemerged from a phase dominated by acting editions into a new era of luxurious volumes aimed at a literary public. “Copyright performances,” one-time, semi-staged readings of plays to secure British performance rights, mark the apex of the law’s influence on the performing arts. The rationale for and style of these performances reveals the law’s strained relationship to performances, a problem echoed in the unevenly applied protectionist manufacturing clauses that appeared in US law in the 1890s.