1. Aim Gun at Foot. 2. Pull Trigger
The release of some old TV shows on DVD has been held up by problems getting licenses for all the music. A number of TV shows used pop songs as background (or even foreground) music, and now the rightsholders of those tunes want additional royalties for DVD release.
None of this should be surprising. When the shows were originally created there was no market for consumer sales of TV shows (except maybe for made-for-TV movies or things like National Geographic specials). As a result, nobody thought about this licensing issue until suddenly DVDs created the market.
In other words, what had been assumed to be a nearly worthless asset now has new and unanticipated value.
Given the state of affairs, one can hardly blame the companies which own the rights to the music for wanting to extract maximum value for their copyrights. But I can't help think that they're shooting themselves in the foot by making it difficult to negotiate royalties. Here's why:
Some money is better than none, and no money is what the music rightsholders will get if the producers of the TV shows either can't release them on DVD or decide to substitute different music.
Now that this issue is out in the open, TV producers are going to be very careful to make sure they own all the rights to the music they use in a show. That means that either familiar tunes will disappear from TV shows, or music rightsholders will be forced to give up a lot more rights for TV use than they used to. It would be stupid for a TV producer to use an Elvis song in a 2005 production without being absolutely certain that the song won't slow down DVD release.
The net result is that some TV shows will highlight new music from unfamiliar artists (where the rights are cheap); and other shows will insist on getting broadcast plus DVD rights for what they used to pay for broadcast rights alone. Either way, the rightsholders of the most popular music get less money than they would have, all because they insisted on making music royalties a stumbling block for DVD release.
ASIDE: I'm becoming more and more convinced that while most companies are very good at tactical thinking (i.e. getting what they want right now), very few companies do a good job of strategic thinking (i.e. anticipating other companies' reactions and working for the best long-term outcome).
A classic example is the common practice (especially in technology) of cutting deals at the end of a quarter to make a sales goal. Good tactics, since you meet the short-term target, but lousy strategy since it trains customers to wait for the end of a quarter and makes sales forecasting very difficult.
Good strategy sometimes requires giving up a short-term goal for a long-term benefit. Companies (public companies in particular) seem to have a very hard time doing this.