BMI-affiliated publishing company for the song catalog of CJ Marsicano. Motto: We take music publishing personally.
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Generic Yellow Bird Music is a BMI-affiliated publishing company controlling the song copyrights of CJ Marsicano. We also consult with independent artists with regard to how to handle their own publishing and writer accounts with BMI and ASCAP, and can even do short-term representation for those artists and bands who may be or are looking to join BMI or ASCAP but are unsure as to whether to start their own publishing company just yet.
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Motto: We take music publishing personally.
Generic Yellow Bird Music started out as a BMI-affiliated publishing company controlling the song copyrights of CJ Marsicano, that has expanded into a record label to reissue his early recordings and publish new material.
The initial releases on GYB were early EDM/techno recordings that CJ had recorded and privately released between 2001 and 2004. These tracks included a five-song EP, WMX8 EP, and four singles, “Ichi”, “Ni”, “San”, and “Shi”. All but “Shi” were reissued by Generic Yellow Bird between September of 2015 and the Spring of 2016. At this time, we had joined up with Distrokid to distribute these releases digitally. We also initiated our own Bandcamp page at http://genericyellowbirdmusic.bandcamp.com at this time.
At the start of 2016, I finally got my own recording spot up and running, and began recording new material. Most of the recordings were of my own material. The first new release to be disemminated was a cover version of R. Stevie Moore’s “Answers” that I had been more than pleased with the result of, followed a few months later by a Greg Ginn-influenced rock instrumental piece, “Diesel Power”.
Generic Yellow Bird Music’s first physical release came out of necessity. Myself and a few fellow ex-bandmates from an old cover band had reconvened for a charity gig, and the rehearsals were going strong enough that we were considering continuing performances past that initial gig. The day of that initial charity gig, a friend of mine from the local scene had lost his home in a sudden fire, and a benefit gig had been quickly set up. I immediately volunteered the band, Insomnia Station, to play our next gig there, and started to plan a compilation of as many of the bands from the same benefit show as possible to get out a companion compilation CD. When not enough of the bands got material to me in time, I took two of my completed song demos, pulled a Dave Grohl circa the first Foo Fighters album, and made those demos the first Insomnia Station release, the “Pancake”/”Token Gestures” single, which came out the Friday before the gig. That physical release replaced the compilation, and proceeds from the sale of that single that first month were earmarked for the benefit.
A friend of mine had been asking me to help her record a new version of a song she had written, and that session became the Effort Never Dies maxi-single by Spitfire And Company. We traded the rights to the master recording and the song publishing in return for the studio time - which became a rather extended process involving at least four different sessions, many of which involved multiple revisions of overdubs. Did I mention that, outside of the lead vocals and acoustic guitar, I ended up being responsible for overdubbing electric guitars, bass, and drums onto the recording? And that the acoustic guitarist/co-writer refused to work with a click track, which made overdubbing the drum track a tedious task in and of itself?
Simultaneous with Insomnia Station’s work, I took advantage of the freedom having my own studio afforded me to work on other projects. The post-punk group Kerosene became another GYB artist with the release of their first single, “Frank”, and a six-song EP entered the planning states almost immediately.
Some complications, including a band with the same name and some outside interference, put atemporary kibosh on Insomnia Station. We solved the name game by renaming the group Project: Rubycon (thank you, Tangerine Dream, for the inspiration) and electing to rebrand the digital edition of “Pancake” with that name. A second, digital-only single, a cover of S.O.A.’s “Public Defender”, was released in the spring of 2018.
By this time, while we were recording everything for free at my studio, Distrokid’s fees were increasing on us. The cost of doing business with them was hampering our ability to release material with them, and the other breaking point was their roundabout way of how we would have had to rebrand the “Pancake” single as a Project: Rubycon release. We also wanted to change the master recording of Kerosene’s “Frank” and had similar issues trying to get that done through Distrokid. We found Stem, and began moving distribution of our back catalog to them in the summer of 2018. Our first “new” release with them was the single by a surf project I have been working on intermittently with my friend Johnny Searfoss called The Beaver Meadows Beach Boys, which had been recorded in 2016 but had not come out after it’s completion (except through Bandcamp) because of Distrokid’s fee ranges. “Only twenty-dollars a year,” my ass! We followed that up in November of 2018 with two Kerosene singles, the stand-alone holiday release “Christmas At Ground Zero” and the second advance single from their forthcoming Life Is Flammable EP, “Oh, Paul!”.
It quickly occured to us that we needed to look at how we were branding our releases. I consider Generic Yellow Bird Music to be an alternative/indie rock label, but I had a pop-rock record from Spitfire And Company and my old techno stuff in the back catalog. I had a friend that wanted to cut some R&B tracks for GYB, and I wanted to try some other genres outside of alternative music, too.
What to do? Expand.
I started several sublabels within GYB in late 2018 and began the rebranding and expansion process. Spitfire And Company, is now the lone artist (so far) on our mainstream pop label, Plucked Records. I moved my EDM recordings to a second subsidiary, Yellow Feather Recordings, and also plan to release R&B material through that label. The Beaver Meadows Beach Bums needed their own “vanity” imprint - that’ll make itself known with their next single in 2019. Spoken word recordings? Enter Bird Speak Recordings. Rock-oriented music that doesn’t fit within the alternative/indie scope of the main label or the mainstream pop slant of Plucked? Say hello to Dainō Recordings. New age and instrumental music? Let me introduce you to the Windham Hill of the 21st Century, Kiiro No Tori.
Furthering the expansion of Generic Yellow Bird Music, in February of 2019 we opened an ASCAP-affiliated publisher, Anthropomorphic Beagle Music, in order to legally work with ASCAP writers and composers who are not yet affiliated with any publishing company.
As for the publishing side... We also consult with independent artists with regard to how to handle their own publishing and writer accounts with BMI and ASCAP, and can even do short-term representation for those artists and bands who may be or are looking to join BMI or ASCAP but are unsure as to whether to start their own publishing company just yet. In this case, we don’t keep the publishing profits for outside writers - we split the money, with the bigger percentage going to the songwriters, not to us, and when those songwriters feel its time to take their own song publishing personally, we’ll give the great majority of that back publishing back to the songwriters.
