Music

Quebec photographers refuse strict Taylor Swift and Foo Fighters contracts

by Jeremy Mersereau

Taylor Swift’s stock keeps rising: Already worth a cool $200 million, the pop star gained a valuable goodwill bump on social media back in June when she took on Apple for their streaming service’s lack of payment during its free trial period. Her open letter (which was posted on Tumblr, naturally) was widely perceived to be the reason the tech giant caved and said they would offer payment to artists during the three-month free trial.

Now Swift is being accused of being no better than Apple, due to an overly restrictive rights-hoarding contract foisted on concert photographers. The contract was so disagreeable to Montreal photographers that five newspapers refused to take any photos of her show at the Bell Centre last Tuesday, with reviews of the show accompanied by file photos or fan shots.

The Montreal Gazette has posted the contract in full. Among the points of contention:

– Any photographs taken could only be used once, no re-using any photos for later stories,

– Taylor Swift and her management could use the photos for any reason they saw fit, promotional or otherwise,

– Swift and co. could confiscate any equipment and delete data off any device that stored the photos if the photographer or publication did not adhere to the contract

Now, there’s nothing people find so satisfying as outing hypocrisy after some shine, but those terms are ridiculous. Jason Sheldon, a freelance photographer based in the UK, was the first to outline Swift’s duplicity in an open letter three weeks ago, decrying her rights-grabbing contract as being exactly as disrespectful to artists as Apple’s. A representative for Swift later told Business Insider that Sheldon ‘misrepresented’ the terms of the contract, and that the contract “clearly states that any photographer shooting The 1989 World Tour has the opportunity for further use of said photographs with management’s approval.”

The Foo Fighters’ recent Festival D’ete set got rained out after only four songs, yet there was a similar problem: their contract gave the Foos’ management the right to approve photos and gave the band ownership of images, with the right to re-used as wanted without compensation to the photographer. Le Soleil sent an illustrator in order to skirt the contract. [Image via Global]