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Fiduciary Duty: Can It Help Calm The Fears Of Underpaid Artists?, Wendy Bartholomew

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The purpose of this note is to examine the legal causes and consequences of what many consider poor label accounting practices, and to propose a solution: imposing a duty on record labels to correctly and transparently collect and distribute artist royalties. If labels operate under a fiduciary duty to their artists when receiving and paying royalties, artists will get paid what they are due. If they are not, artists will have viable remedies available to them--remedies that create an incentive for labels to make positive changes in the way they handle royalty accounting. This will, in turn, work to repair …