Michael Machat grew up in the music business.  His father Marty Machat was a pioneering music lawyer going back to the 1950s.   He was the Jewish lawyer that represented black entertainers that prominent white law firms stayed away from.  He represented some of the most important and influential entertainers of our time, including the legendary middle weight boxer Sugar Ray Robinson and legendary artists James Brown, Dinah Washington, Brook Benton, Clyde Otis and Sam Cooke, back in the days when he and his clients were made to go into clubs through the back door, not for today's security reasons but due to the racially prejudiced fears of those times.   Marty Machat went on to represent numerous English artists, negotiating contracts for bands such as The Kinks, Herman's Hermits, the Rolling Stones, The Who, ELO, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, as well as North American Artists such as The Platters, The Four Seasons, Sly & The Family Stone,  and many more including the artist and poet, Leonard Cohen.   In addition to negotiating contracts for his clients, Marty Machat sued record companies, on behalf of his artists, fighting for their royalties and, in some instances, their right to be free from their recording contracts.

 

Michael was trained in the art of writing contracts by his father Marty Machat.   Back in the day before laptops or pc's, music contracts were of course much shorter than they are today. Now with modern word processing software, unfortunately most lawyers no longer carefully select only the most important elements to incorporate into a contract.  Everything tends to be thrown in, including the kitchen sink, and so that is how music contracts read today. Some are written as if vinyl was still king.   Machat however retains the art of writing a contract on the fly incorporating the essential elements into a two page memorandum without having to cut and paste ad nauseam.  

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Machat's dad Marty Machat spent a significant amount of his practice renegotiating contracts on behalf of artists, and ironically it was the short two pagers that were the hardest to find a loophole.   Back in the 1980's Marty Machat found one such loophole in a long form contract and was able to negotiate the largest deal of the time in the music industry for Electric Light Orchestra signing them to CBS Records with Walter Yetnicoff.  

 

Today, Michael Machat continues to follow his father's family tradition of doing his utmost to protect his clients' rights with care and integrity.  He negotiates and reviews contracts as well as litigates against record companies and publishing companies that are not fairly accounting to the artists and/or their heirs.    He understands the stress and financial worry artists can suffer when this happens to them.  If you suspect you are not being accounted to fairly, we invite you to reach out to Machat & Associates for a free evaluation.  Every artist deserves to be paid every penny for his or her work.