It's a sad truth that the more you dig into the inner-workings of the music industry - even the "Christian" music industry - and the more time you spend working within it, the more stories you are likely to hear like this one about KJ-52's 2014 Mental being unlawfully distributed by a former manager.
Today, KJ sent out a letter to friends, exposing the ugly story behind the album involving misuse of the rights to the songs and withheld profits, urging readers not to buy a fake copy of the album and to spread the word about it.
KJ writes:
In late November 2013 I signed a 3 year deal memo with my then manager to release the mental album.. after about a year or so I realized some things weren’t adding up ..mainly in the $ and royalty dept... no one had received any payouts and no accounting for the expenses had been issued. I realized the album had made a reasonable amount of money via digital & physical sales & was told that album was “unrecouped” ...but the one statement I received from music services spoke to the opposite. I decided to end our working relationship when the agreement came to an end in November 2016 and go fully independent... rather than pursuing legal action I trusted the fans to support like they always had .. & they did! The Jonah album was funded 200% in December! The mental album however was still being distributed digitally thru Gotee after the deal had expired.. learning that multiple artists had been cut out of the songwriting royalties (social club/Tedashi/KB etc) and had never been paid I requested that they remove it from all digital services (iTunes/Spotify/amazon etc), after explaining all this to them Gotee swiftly complied and removed it. I hold the copyrights to those songs and so I re-uploaded the songs and put it back out in an attempt to make things right financially with my friends that helped out with record... this is the 52 records version that is up currently. Recently my former manager re-uploaded another version w/ incorrect but similar artwork/misspelled artist names & a random instrumental .. this is the TPC version .. this version will put 0 $ in the artist pockets + has been done past the expiration date of our deal memo. I’m currently working on getting this pulled but it’s an arduous & long process as there is a ton of digital platforms.. Here’s the track listing of the incorrect one u can see it here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/mental/id1279383884. (It’s the same on any digital music format) Notice the 52 records one @ the bottom Thanks so much for the support thru the years.. this is frustrating but your consistent support is an encouragement to me on so many levels.. Thanks Kj
What can u do to help?
Notice the paradigm collective @ the bottom)
Here’s the correct one https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/mental/id1270477278
(Again it’s the same on any digital format)
For more info on KJ-52, visit the JFH Artists Database.
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