Collective CT - Session I: How to Protect and Monetize Music
Mini-Conference | Sponsored by Yale School of Music, Yale Schwarzman Center, and the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale
Building Artistic Careers that Meet the Moment
The conditions under which artists and scholars build careers are changing with unprecedented speed. Intellectual property, contracts, institutional transformation, and public trust are no longer background considerations—they are the very terrain of professional life. This convening brings together leaders in law and scholarship to examine how artists, alumni, and cultural workers can design careers that respond to these realities with resilience, clarity, and imagination.
Session I: How to Protect and Monetize Music
4:00 – 5:30 PM
Joseph Kim, Esq.
This presentation is intended to educate musicians about the legal and business aspects of music. Specifically, they will learn how to protect and monetize music. The presentation will be based on the following musical scenario: Phyllis records herself singing a song co-written by Janna and Michael and previously released by Richard. Jimmy mixes Phyllis’s recording with a separate recording of piano accompaniment and background vocals by Joseph. Phyllis intends to sell the mixed recording and donate the net proceeds of the sale to Eli University.
Based on this scenario, the legal bases for monetization of the mixed recording and how it can be monetized will be discussed. As a brief introduction to music copyright will be provided initially, no prior knowledge of music (or any other) law will be necessary to understand the content of this presentation.
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Though ethnically Korean, Joseph was born and raised in Japan. To shield him from discrimination, which was pervasive against Koreans in Japan then, Joseph’s parents enrolled him in international schools in Tokyo. Since classes were taught in English in those schools, most of their graduates, including Joseph, came to the United States to pursue higher education.
Joseph majored in Political Science at Yale College, focusing on international relations and political philosophy. Thereafter he attended Yale Law School, where he wrote theses on how international law could counter discrimination in Japan and other countries where domestic antidiscrimination law was inadequate to do so.
A member of the California and New York Bars, Joseph has practiced entertainment law for 36 years. His legal specialty within entertainment is music. Joseph was in-house counsel at A&M Records (now part of Universal Music Group), in the music department at Disney and at Paulist Productions, a film and TV production company in Los Angeles. Joseph has also practiced law privately, representing American and Japanese artists, producers, record labels and an advertising agency, among others.
Contemporaneously with his legal practice, Joseph has taught entertainment and media law, including music law specifically, for 27 years to college and law students at Pepperdine University, University of California at Irvine and The Los Angeles Film School. 45 years after graduating from Yale College, Joseph has happily returned to his alma mater to teach Entertainment Law as a Residential College Seminar this fall semester. His academic mission is to educate musicians in the Yale community about the legal and business aspects of music.
Though his passion far exceeds his talent in music according to Joseph, he has pursued it since childhood until the present. Joseph studied classical singing and piano with faculty at the Yale and Eastman Schools of Music respectively, jazz piano and composition privately with Taylor Eigsti and musical theatre privately with Josh Young. Joseph attended the Stanford Jazz Workshop as a singer in 2019 and 2024. His poem “Daichan”, about a Korean boy growing up in Japan, set to choral music by his friend and composer Jeffrey Parola, was sung by the Los Angeles Chamber Choir at UCLA and world-premiered by Exilio (a USC chamber choir) in 2024.
Joseph’s life has come full circle academically and artistically.
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Collective CT is an eight-month cultural accelerator powered by the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale in partnership with the State of Connecticut and MOC Innovations. Designed as a free “mini-MBA for artists,” the program equips Connecticut creators with training, mentorship, and infrastructure usually reserved for startups in STEM. All sessions are open to the public, making Collective CT both an accelerator for artists and a statewide forum for reimagining cultural innovation: treating artists as founders, ideas as infrastructure, and culture as a driver of economic and civic vitality.