Want to know about the 'Lost in Music' Concept? Read more here about this initiative to demystify and explain legal issues in the music industry.

The launch of this free, open access resource is the latest initiative to emanate from the Centre for Law Society and Popular Culture at Westminster Law School that attempts to help musicians understand the music industry. We have taught Entertainment Law since the early 1990s and outside of our teaching and research, some years ago produced a booklet, An Artist’s Guide to the Music Industry as part of the Enterprise in Higher Education initiative. This was given out free to artists as a sort of basic ‘know your rights’, and was later supported enthusiastically by the Musicians Union and given out to both members and interested parties who approached the MU for information or advice. This latest development is a logical extension of that.

The ‘Lost in Music’ project is playing on the idea that the music industry is an area in which it is easy to get ‘lost’, and aims to provide a pathway to help navigate and demystify the area. From our teaching experience it is clear that many of the concepts are complex and take time to unpack and understand. Outside of academia, many artists complain that the business and legal side of the music industry is something that they find confusing, and professionals working in the area in various roles often remark that they would like to have more knowledge of broader issues relating to the law that impacts upon their roles.

The overarching aim of the project is to provide free accessible information and guidance to help navigate the area. We intend the Lost in Music Project to be an on-going and iterative one, and the first stage of this is this excellent resource focussed on music plagiarism. We are indebted here to one of our former students, Simon Anderson (LLM Entertainment Law, 2015) who provided much of the material for this. We had been looking for some time to develop a resource that, partially inspired by the US based Music Copyright Information Resource, would offer some information and guidance on issues relating to this area. We were therefore delighted when Simon developed just this for his superb Dissertation delivered as part of his LLM, and later developed this into a talk that he has given around the country, including to our own students, entitled Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. Simon has been instrumental in this project and we are indebted to him for agreeing to become involved in the project.

Whilst the aspect of Lost in Music for which we currently have funding is for this digital resource on music plagiarism, we see it developing in a number of ways in the future and hope Lost in Music will be an important and dynamic resource that a variety of users find useful.

We are very grateful to the Quintin Hogg Trust for their support of the initial stages of this project, and will be seeking further funding in due course to develop this, and ideas and suggestions about the site, future directions and ideas for funding will be gratefully received.

Guy Osborn Professor of Law, Westminster Law School G.Osborn@westminster.ac.uk