Delivering the feature address during a Copyright Music Organization (COTT) members’ meeting on the theme From Songwriting to Royalties, held in Tobago, Winchester lashed out against the pirates, urging composers to protect themselves.
Speaking out against fellow artistes who claim pirates help make their songs more popular, Winchester said: “You may get one or two chances for live performances but you are meanwhile fuelling a mechanism that will eventually destroy you and the art-form.”
When asked about how pirates manage to get their hands on the songs so quickly, Winchester said: “I’ll be real, here – the radio stations – the DJs. I’ll tell you, I released “Wine Down Low” one Friday morning on a radio station and by midday, I was walking up Fredrick Street and I heard my song playing on a pirate’s cart.”
“I looked at the lady vendor in astonishment and she looked right back at me and said ‘Yeah is you. Yuh want to do something about it?”
“I spend thousands of dollars to produce a song, then I have to pay to compile the album, then I have to pay for packaging, then I have to pay to get the album together, then to master, then to produce copies. All of this is my expense, All the pirate does is push a cart with my songs on CDs, which he is selling for $30 or less my work that he stole and you telling me he needs to eat?”
This year’s International Soca Monarch and Groovy Soca Monarch king also spoke about the threats posed by today’s technology, Winchester warned that computer hackers could gain access to stored work, bringing an even more urgent consideration to the need for registering music as soon as it is credited.
