GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE.

FILM composers; MOTION picture industry; MUSIC industry; WOMEN composers; ACADEMY Awards

Features CREATING MUSIC IN 21st-century Hollywood, as a composer for an Emmy-winning cable series put it, "feels like an underground, a real pimp situation." The executives suggested that the problem of distributing royalties lay with the PROs and said that composers who don't want to take buyouts can simply reject that clause when negotiating their contracts - something many early-career composers are understandably hesitant to do. When it comes to royalties, the veteran Hollywood-music person told me, the standard split with the lead composer is 50-50 per cue, even if the additional or ghost composer does all the work. Occasionally, the issue of ghost composing pops up in the media, as when, in 2014, the deaf Japanese composer Mamoru Samuragochi, a so-called "digital-age Beethoven", was found to have employed a ghost composer for 18 years. [Extracted from the article]

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