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Contract problems will soon be a thing of the past for young musicians in the UK.

The British government is to about to take over the task of looking after their interests, they’ll be relieved to learn.

A new committee will be working with the likes of the discredited Featured Artists Coalition, the performers’ organisation which first came out strongly against the entertainment industry’s Three Strikes proposal to disconnect people said to have shared music with each other online,  only to completely reverse its position not long after.

“The Intellectual Property Office is following up on its promise to clarify and clean up contracts between artists and record companies by appointing a team to ‘ensure artists don’t sign everything away when they are young’,” says MusicWeek, going on:

“Intellectual Property minister David Lammy, in collaboration with the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, made the promise to draw together a working party to develop model contracts or contract clauses that strike a fair balance between the rights of creators and publishers as one of its 32 “conclusions and actions” in last year’s report © the way ahead: A Strategy for Copyright in the Digital Age.”

The Department for Business Innovation, etc, is the fiefdom of Peter ‘Mandy’ Mandelson, the man chosen by Hollywood and Big music to represent their vested corporate interests in the UK.

He’s the principal face behind the Three Strikes bill under which the government, supported by UK taxpayers, would look after entertainment industry copyright concerns, and ISPs would act a copyright cops against their own customers, who’d be at risk of being thrown off the net on the say-so of Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, and Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures.

Now “a spokesman for the IPO says it is close to formulating the team and expects to approach publishers and groups such as the Featured Artists Coalition in order to progress work on the ‘muddled’ contracts before the end of March”, says MusicWeek, quoting the spokesman as stating:

“We want to ensure that artists when they sign young don’t lose out because some of these contracts – certainly in the fine print – are like entering a pact with the devil,” he says.

He “expects the work will involve a number of industry-related workshops”.

The story doesn’t say how many millions of pounds will be spent on sorting things out, what role the corporate cartels will play, who will decide precisely what comprises a “fair balance”, or what will be used to legitimise the now squeaky clean contracts.

And there’s not a word about the most important elements of all — the fans and voters, the people upon whom these diverse interests wholly depend.

Stay tuned.

Or not.

Jon Newton