The official blog of Stathis Kassios for Business, Media, Economics & Arts

Why should I get a trademark registration? You can sell products or offer services in the EU without having a registered trademark. So you might ask, why should I register my trademark? There are several reasons why registering your trademark is a good idea. Rights Throughout the EU. By obtaining a EU registration of your trademark, you can have more confidence that you have rights to use your mark throughout the entire European Union, without worrying that your trademark rights will be limited because of someone else’s activities (because of that person’s legal rights in a trademark.). It is also wise to research whether someone else is already using a mark similar to yours by doing a comprehensive trademark availability search before applying to register your trademark. Working with Your Distributors If you plan to work with re-sellers or distributors to sell your products or services, having a trademark registration lets you control your own brand. Many times, a re-s...

Through my experience and the practical knowledge that I have gained over the years, I can hardly recall of a single artist or band, even close affiliated musicians, that has received roaylties directly from their company, in a predetermined, scheduled time. I will not refer to intellectual copyright collectors, like the American ASCAP & BMI or GEMA in Germany & JASRAC in Japan. I will try to focus on royalties derived from both physical & digital sales of recordings.  To make it short, the notorious royalty is usually calculated as a fixed percentage of an album's wholesale price, when a quantity of albums is ordered by various distributors/diffusion channels that are responsible to forward the album in the markets. I should mention that music revenues have been decreasing because of increasing piracy phenomena, but this is another story to be discussed in a future post. I personally assume that not all labels deliberately strive to screw their artists, since the...