It's easy to say, and important to do, but also hard to do.
These relationships always have a hugely asymmetrical power balance. As a contractor your reputation is so critical and the games industry is a small place. And there are far more artists than jobs.
Contracts are in actuality tend to be based on trust. The contract probably said the payment was due when tracks were approved. If iD drags their feet on approving the tracks, then Mick is in trouble.
If the contract were instead structured payment on delivery, then iD is in trouble if Mick delivers substandard work.
Even if Marty's side of the story were 100% true (which seems doubtful), throwing a hissy-fit on Reddit basically stating "I hired a terrible person to do the music so don't blame me" is a bad look.
If iD drags their feet on approving the tracks,
then Mick is in trouble.
If the contract were instead structured payment
on delivery, then iD is in trouble if Mick delivers
substandard work.
Thank you for stating this so clearly and succinctly. There are a lot of simplistic "should have had a better contract! should have had a lawyer!" etc type comments here.
Aside from extremely trivial stuff (and maybe not even then) contracts and lawyers aren't perfect magic armor for either side.
You still need both parties to act in relatively good faith or somebody is going to be screwed over to some extent.
I might not have gotten it had I not seen it happen with (construction) contractors.
A sub-contractor did terrible work, and took out a mechanic's lien on our house nearly immediately after completion. One of their workers then assaulted my wife when she yelled at his mother (his mother apparently handled the finances and was trying to pressure my wife into signing something she didn't agree with about the quality of work).
On the other hand, mechanic's liens exist specifically for the case where the general contractor is not being timely with payment to subs; it's basically the only lever they have. In this case the lien was improper, and the AG told us we should sue if we didn't have evidence of it being lifted by EOD. I do wonder how many people just capitulate and pay for shoddy work just to make them go away.
Reading through this particular situation though, he was in a unique position to negotiate due to all of management bungles.
1. Original soundtrack author.
2. Conference announcement that he would be producing the sound track as presales exploded.
There were others as well.
I'm a very patient person, but one thing I've learned over the years is that you can't drag your feet when people are intentionally stalling you.
Within 2 weeks of the E3 announcement after multiple attempts to get it resolved, you have to make it clear that you can't continue working without a contract in place.
I'm sure it's a "hindsight is 20/20" situation, but it was hard to read through all of that management abuse without seeing him put his proverbial foot down.
That's a very valid statement, but at the same time you have to be prepared for it if you plan to be a contractor anyway.
You need your own agreements. You need somebody to review agreements presented to you. If there are IP concerns you need to have clear legal language present around that as well.
To get there, it's worth it to network in attorney circles. It's well worth it.
In creative industries it's incredibly common not to get paid for 6 months or more.
I remember a certain animation studio based out of NYC that worked on an entire animated series for 9 months after only getting paid for the first episode and then their client had a meeting with them and said "Jesus told me not to do this project". That was the end of the project and the studio. Nobody got paid. They were already constantly 6 months behind paying their animators before taking on that job...
