American Songwriter » Licensing

Report: SoundExchange Doled Out $292 Million In Royalties In 2011

Carrie Acree — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:22:00 +0000

SoundExchange, a non-profit performance rights group that collects royalties from various hosts for streaming sound recordings, reported last quarter as their most successful yet. During the fourth quarter of 2011, more than 18,000 payments by satellite radio, Internet radio, and cable television music channels equaled out to a distribution of $89.5 million. As a record-breaking quarter for SoundExchange, this addition to the year-end royalty payment totaled $292 million. Not only is this a 17 percent increase from 2010, but this large improvement for SoundExchange is only one of many enhancements to the company made in this past year. In order to ensure continuous growth, SoundExchange hired new employees for its executive and technical teams and broke ground on a data and claims department. These additions were a perfect counter action to the registration of 15,300 new artists, labels, and copyright holders. Wanting to improve the royalties process as a whole, SoundExchange increased technical capabilities and established new agreements with foreign complements, while furthering existing relationships. President Michael Huppe assures continuous growth, stating, “We’re optimistic about the industry’s future, and about the tremendous value SoundExchange promises to deliver in the years to come.” To learn more, visit www.soundexchange.com

Getting Your Music Licensed: A Q&A with Sarah Gavigan

Riley Schilling Moore — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:33:52 +0000

Sarah Gavigan is a music licensing consultant who has placed thousands of indie and unsigned artists to television commercials over the course of her 20-year career. She has also worked as a talent agent, and taught music licensing at UCLA. Gavigan currently leads interactive music licensing workshops through her online educational community GetYourMusicLicensed.com. We caught up with her in Nashville recently. How did you get into music licensing? It was by accident. I spent the majority of my career in the commercial production world representing cinematographers – essentially, I was an agent. I ended up representing a collective of directors from Iceland that were also in a band signed to Warner Brothers called Gus Gus. And just from being around them, I found myself around a lot of other indie musicians, most directly at the 1999 Iceland Airway Conference. I started to look around and I saw that there was no one really representing independent record labels and artists to advertisers. I formed a company in 2000 to represent independent record labels and artists to advertisers. We did thousands of licenses and made millions of dollars for indie artists. It was a really exciting time, because it was right at the shift of the industry. Digital was coming in and things were changing rapidly. People had very polarizing views on music licensing. In some cases, I was looked down upon and in other cases I was revered for what I was doing. It was a pretty exciting time to be in the eye of the storm. What does a typical day of work look like for you? On average, I’ve got two or three projects going on. For me, a project is anything from a web film, or television commercial or a branding project – it could be a young fashion brand wants to get involved in music so I’m coming up with ideas for them on how to do that. Of the time I spend as a music supervisor, I would say half of that time I spend searching and organizing. So I get 500 some odd emails a week from major record labels, indie record labels and unsolicited emails coming in, saying, “Hey, listen to my music.” So from there starts a pretty in-depth cataloguing system that I work on with my interns and my assistants. We file through everything and we start to tag and catalogue it in our own system. So we’ll hear something and we may not find something that’s right for it right now, but we’ll put it into a playlist, so that when a job like that comes up, we’ll go to that playlist. So a lot of my time is spent organizing and listening and trying to make sure I have my finger on pulse with what’s going on. The other half of my time is spent managing and negotiating on paperwork. I think everyone thinks that music supervision is being a D.J. It is not being a D.J. It is so much more than choosing a song. It comes down to getting the deal done fairly. What makes a certain type of music more licensable? Are there certain genres that are more licensable? Or just specific songs? I think really it’s about the DNA of a song. I’ve attended a lot of songwriters’ workshops in the last couple years really to understand how musicians are learning to write songs, and if you think about how songs were written 50 years ago, they were written so simply. They weren’t complicated and it doesn’t mean music is any less for it. One thing I say to musicians that I work with, if you’re going to write lyrics for licensing, the less it means the more it works. That’s my mantra. We have to tell stories in 30 or 60 seconds. Even though it’s on the TV, we have to tell the story that quickly, so the music has to admit something that fast. We end up using instrumentals more often than not and that’s why. It seems like more artists have become interested in getting their music licensed. Have you noticed a big shift in this in the last few years? I’d say that the shift is seismic, and for a lot of reasons. The number one reason is that it’s the number one source of revenue in the music industry. The last time I checked it was 2009 that I started hearing that it was the number one source. Secondly, the advertising industry flipped out when the internet started to change things. “Oh my god, television's dead,” they said. No, television’s not dead, but what it’s done is it’s created more opportunity for content, and brands are taking advantage of that. What’s the best way for an independent band or artist –without a lot of contacts – to get placement in a television commercial? First, you need to watch a lot of television. It seems like a strange thing to say but you need to understand the marketplace. You need to understand what music is being used and you have to assess your own music or where it sits in that lineup, and then it becomes about diligent research. I’m a true believer that mass marketing is not only wrong but dangerous for artists in the music licensing world. We get pummeled with so many e-mails. The only ones that make it through that list are the ones that truly catch our attention, and a mass e-mail doesn’t do that. It’s not personal; it doesn’t speak to who I am. If you do a little bit of research on me, you understand that I generally use a specific kind of music over and over again. Music supervisors are around. We broadcast our work every day. So know something about that person. Do your homework before you contact them, and you’ll have a much greater chance of getting through.

Trent Reznor Endorses TuneCore’s New Songwriter Service

Riley Schilling Moore — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:55:40 +0000

TuneCore, the online music distributor for artists like Beck, Bjork, Aretha Franklin and Jay-Z is launching its Songwriter Publishing Administrative Service today. The new service will be an opportunity for writers to issue licenses, protect copyrights and songs, collect money and register their copyrights around the globe. CEO Jeff Price proudly remarks that “no longer will songwriters be shut out of a system. In addition to letting artists get their money in a direct and transparent manner our team is also getting the artists their earnings faster and matching up millions of uncollected dollars with their rightful owners.” Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is one of several hundred songwriters who have already signed up for the beta testing period of the service, registering his new project How To Destroy Angels. TuneCore believes the service will get these writers “more money in a shorter period of time.” Because the service works directly with digital music services, it eliminates the liaisons used by other services, thus allowing significant increase in songwriter’s earnings. Songwriters can join TuneCore for the one time fee of $49.99 and 10% of all money collected by TuneCore. At present, the service is available exclusively to artists using the TuneCore distribution service, but TuneCore aims to open the service to any rights holder very soon. For more information, visit http://pub.help.tunecore.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/180/ HOW IT WORKS: The TuneCore Songwriter Publishing Administration Service enables any songwriter to sign up for global publishing administration immediately. It will: 1. Register songwriter's songs with organizations that use and track their copyrights so they know they exist, what songs are theirs and what money belongs to them. 2. Issue any licenses needed and handle any requests for the use of a songwriter's songs in TV shows, movies, commercials and other media, and negotiate any licenses with TuneCore's in-house Film & Visual Media department to get them the best possible terms. 3. Represent the songwriter and aggressively pursue all of their songwriting earnings. 4. Get songwriter's existing "found" money back before it is given to someone else. 5. Police the world on the songwriter's behalf to find illegal usage or copyright violation and make it stop and/or get the songwriter paid.

Digital-Only Classical Label Takes On Rock And Roll

Davis Inman — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:19:13 +0000

X5 compilations have topped the iTunes classical music charts. Now they're taking on Sun Records catalog. X5 Music Group is a Stockholm-based music startup that is helping to rethink the way labels package and release albums digitally. X5 licenses classical music catalogs and creates attractively-priced digital albums that appeal to a younger demographic. X5's business model is so promising that it lured Scott Ambrose Reilly, a digital music executive with years of experience licensing music as the head of Amazon's MP3 Store, to lead their U.S. operations in a new New York office. Reilly says it's the "digital potential" that attracted him to join X5's team. "All the way back in 1995-96, when I was first doing digital promotions and downloads with bands, all the ways you thought [digital] might change the industry in the way that content was created - distribution changed - but a lot of the other things haven't really come to fruition." X5 was founded in 2003, and soon the founders started packaging content specifically for the digital marketplace, with a focus on the classical music genre. In May 2008, X5 released a compilation album entitled The 50 Most Essential Pieces of Classical Music for $9.99 and the album has spent time at to the top of the iTunes classical music chart. Reilly says the reason he and other X5 executives believe the model has worked is because it's attracting new fans to classical music. "We don't think we sold a lot of classical music to a lot of classical fans," says Reilly. X5's three founders each had backgrounds as songwriters and producers in Sweden and had dabbled in the ringtone business. They decided early on that the new company's model would be exclusively digital. "As soon as they made that decision," says Reilly, "the future was all growth and innovation, which is exciting." One thing X5 hopes to help reshape is the music industry status quo around album releases. "The business model that we're still living under is the LP vinyl business model that got created at the end of the '60s," says Reilly. "An artist needs to not be married to that as the end-all-be-all of how people engage with their music." That means rethinking album lead times and street dates, and even the length of albums. Reilly says all of these things are still tied to physical world, instead of being packaged with digital-first in mind. But aren't even the most innovative artists still nostalgia buffs for the heyday of the music industry? When a fan bought their favorite group's new record at the local record shop and took it home? What about the days when you pulled the record out of the sleeve and gently dropped the needle on fresh vinyl, then sat down and rolled a joint on the LP sleeve and... just listened. "It's hard to know how it evolves," says Reilly about the business of releasing new music. "Is every Tuesday the structure that still makes sense? What artists should be thinking about is how do people listen to their music? You can't change that. Customers are going to buy their music the way they choose to. Your fans and the customer have to lead that discussion. The artists have to go to where the customers are already listening to music." Now X5 will try to apply their model to music outside the classical genre. They recently struck a deal with Nashville-based Sun Records, home to the early Sam Phillips Memphis rock and roll recordings of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. "Sun has done a good job of creating packages that service the Sun aficionados," says Reilly. "What we want to do is create albums that will appeal to people who know who Johnny Cash is but don't have any in their collection. Who maybe have never heard of Roscoe Gordon or only know Charlie Rich from his two mega hits that their parents used to listen to." As for branching out into new genres, Reilly, who was calling on potential clients in London when we spoke by Skype, says, "There's a lot to learn and there's a lot of opportunity." One side of the business that X5 has a clear grasp of is bringing classical music to new fans. In November, they will release a 24-track compilation called The Greatest Video Game Music, with the themes from "007: Blood Stone" and the popular app game "Angry Birds" performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. "We think we've brought a lot of young people into classical music. We're thinking: how do we take that even further?" asks Reilly. "Video games. There are great songs in video games."

TuneSat Now Tracking Music For All Rights Holders

Davis Inman — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:53:42 +0000

Following the growing music industry trend of making enterprise-level technology available in a self-serve format, the audio fingerprinting platform TuneSat announced on Tuesday that their service will be available to all rights holders. Founded in 2007, TuneSat monitors the web and television broadcasts for music usage. The company has focused on monitoring 200 major stations in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, and Italy, and are now adding eight more major European markets such as Norway, Denmark, and Spain, to their tracking map. TuneSat has previously helped major music companies like SESAC, Universal, and Sony track their songs. Using the new service, artists will be able to upload their songs, which TuneSat fingerprints and begins tracking for usage across television broadcasts. TuneSat provides analytic data for clients, making it easy to detect any discrepancies between what's been played and what they've been paid. TuneSat's expanded reach and new self-serve initiative come on the heels of the company's $6 million funding earlier this year, from investors including the General Electric Pension Trust. Chris Woods, a songwriter and composer who co-founded TuneSat and currently serves as the company's Chief Operating Officer, says that 80% of music played on television is not reported. "Our vision was always to make TuneSat accessible to any size copyright holder who cared about how their songs were being used," Woods said in a press release. "Now anyone can quickly and easily get started using TuneSat to ensure they are getting paid what they deserve for the use of their music.” The new subscription rates are based on how many song titles an artist chooses to track in how many territories, but according to the company, the rates can be as low as $10 a month.

RIAA Protests Termination Rights; Don Henley Weighs In

Jessica Pace — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 21:13:33 +0000

Musicians and songwriters' "termination rights" could mean more dollars and cents for artists like Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel and Bob Dylan. United States copyright law was revised in the mid '70s, granting artists the rights to their work after 35 years, provided they applied two years in advance.

Albums and singles issued after January 1, 1978 are the first recordings to be protected by termination rights. The United States Copyright Office's records show that musicians who have already filed to regain control of their material include Tom Petty, Loretta Lynn, Dylan and Kris Kristofferson.

“In terms of all those big acts you name, the recording industry has made a gazillion dollars on those masters, more than the artists have,” Don Henley, founding member of The Eagles and a co-founder of artists' rights organization the Recording Artists Coalition, says in the New York Times. “So there’s an issue of parity here, of fairness. This is a bone of contention, and it’s going to get more contentious in the next couple of years.”

Though it's good news for the artists, this law is a death threat for labels that stay afloat on sales of music by these musicians and songwriters. Bigwig labels Universal, EMI, Warner and Sony BMG have announced that they're prepared to do legal battle over these recordings. Steven Marks, a lobbyist for the Recording Industry Association of America, referred to the recordings as "works for hire" in the New York Times.

Read a Q&A with Henley on the subject here.

iCloud To Be Unveiled At Upcoming Apple Event

Davis Inman — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:08:05 +0000

In a press release on Tuesday, Apple announced that the focus on next week's Worldwide Developers Conference will be soundly on software. Steve Jobs will come off medical leave to lead a keynote address on Monday, June 6. The press release has surprised many tech watchers. Apple has been typically cagey before major announcements, and previous WWDC events have seen the launch of new iPhones. But Apple has decided to show their cards ahead of time and one belief is that the company hopes to dispel rumors that a new iPhone is coming. (Some sources say an iPhone 5 - or iPhone 4G S - will be announced in the fall.) The focus instead, according to the press release, will be on software, namely new versions of Apple's operating systems for mobile and Mac - iOS 5 and Mac OSX Lion. But perhaps more exciting for consumers is the official announcement of Apple's iCloud. The press release doesn't offer much more than the description "Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering," though one expected feature of iCloud is the so-called celestial music jukebox, which would include the ability to play music stored in the cloud across different devices. As recently reported, Apple has closed deals with EMI, Sony, and Warner, and is likely in the final stages of negotiating a licensing deal with Universal, the largest of the four major label groups. iCloud is expected to replace Apple's MobileMe, a $100 a year subscription service for online tools like storage and sharing. Apple has had a series of offerings in this arena, including iDisk and .Mac, though iCloud has become most closely associated with a cloud-based iTunes, especially since Apple bought (and quickly shuttered) the online streaming service, Lala, one year ago.

Music Supervisors Panel Enlightens Nashville

Doug Waterman — Tue, 31 May 2011 17:04:03 +0000

L to R: Dave Parker, Julia Michels, Dave Jordan, Anastasia Brown, Julianne Jordan, Rachel Levy and Jojo Villanueva. On May 21, 821 Entertainment Group President Anastasia Brown (music supervisor for Footloose, August Rush, Taken) moderated the Nashville Screenwriters Conference’s annual “Music In the Movies” panel. Sponsored by Ole, one of the world’s largest independent music publishers, the event took place at the Country Music Hall of Fame and was well attended by songwriters, publishers, producers, songpluggers, artists and others seeking a foot in door of Hollywood’s music department. Featured panelists included music supervisors Julia Michels (Sex and the City 1&2, The Blind Side, The Devil Wears Prada), Dave Jordan (Captain America, Iron Man 1&2, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle), Julianne Jordan (Hop, Valentine's Day, Mr. And Mrs. Smith), Rachel Levy (Little Fockers, Fast and Furious 5, Change Up), Jojo Villanueva (Prom, Arthur, Marmaduke) and Dave Parker, a highly-regarded indie publisher with more than 100 placements this year. There were some common threads that ran through the discussion—as far as dos, don'ts, and other things to be conscious of—for those searching out song placement opportunities. Here’s what resonated most: • Do your research before reaching out to music supervisors. Know exactly what project they are working on and what kind of music they are looking for. If you send them something that contradicts what they need, you’ll most likely be blackballed from the supervisor’s working order. Make sure to include all “metadata” for your songs for digital delivery. “Track 2” doesn’t work. Deliver songs via DropBox, YouSendIt or a similar method. Don’t send mp3s unless agreed upon beforehand. • Secure a publisher or a specialty film & TV pitching agent If you’re not in the precious position of having direct contacts/relationships with music supervisors, your best bet is to hook up with a publisher or a film & TV placement company to work on your behalf. The panel stated that they generally delete all unsolicited outside communication—meaning songs or links that come from untrustworthy sources, or outside their working network of publishers, placement companies and others. • If you have the talent and resources, produce great-sounding cover song recordings (Except Beatles songs and others that don’t lend themselves to licensing ease, or are outright impossible to clear.) Directors these days love to use old familiar songs that are re-imagined by new voices and visions. This can generate you income on the master-use license side of things. • Make sure your songs are easy to license Now more than ever, music supervisors and directors are generally more welcoming of independent artists and writers because they don’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops to obtain licenses for their songs. The one-stop-shop approach is what is working most effectively. Don’t pitch songs that you know a co-writer (or co-writer’s publisher, especially if it is a major label publisher) won’t sign off on, for whatever reason. Anything that could stand in the way of a song successfully being licensed should be considered BEFORE pitching it. Deal-breaker situations reflect poorly on the song’s promoter and can lead to the aforementioned blackball list. • Filing away instrumental tracks is essential Have all of your instrumental tracks available and on hand for quick turnaround if and when they are needed for a placement project. Not having them is a good way to lose a great opportunity. • Attention new indie artists and bands: you can compete! In recent years, music placement in film, TV and advertisements have been trending toward new and/or unknown artists and bands, as opposed to successful and well-known acts like Led Zeppelin or Coldplay. One reason is that going indie is a lot less expensive, and as stated, there are less licensing hurdles. The other motive behind the trend is that music supervisors, directors and ad agencies genuinely take great satisfaction in breaking new acts and talent through their projects. The playing field is pretty darn level, so get after it while the getting’s good.

Top Indie Publisher Starts Record Label

Davis Inman — Mon, 16 May 2011 19:09:31 +0000

The Ettes have been signed to the new label, Krian Music Group. The Royalty Network, a New York-based independent publishing house that represents a diverse spectrum of songwriters and producers from the likes of Pete Seeger and Justin Townes Earle to Buck$ and Sizzla, has just announced the formation of a sister record label called Krian Music Group. Krian, which will be distributed by Universal/Fontana, will release upcoming albums from Nashville's The Ettes, dance-rockers VHS Or Beta, as well as Buck$ and Richie Loop. Interestingly, Frank Liwall, the President of both Royalty and Krian, says the company was inspired to launch the label after seeing a gap in the marketplace. "We looked at artists we had been publishing, with successful film and television licensing histories, and realized a number of great acts were without a label home," says Liwall. While record labels have done their best to weather the downturn in the sales of recorded music, publishers have stayed afloat in the changing industry by maximizing exposure for artists through things like film and T.V. placements, as well as lucrative video game placements. With Royalty's lead, it wouldn't surprise many in the industry if more publishing entities used their existing networks and relationships to provide label services for artists.

Google Music To Rival Amazon Cloud

Davis Inman — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:46:29 +0000

Google execs confirmed to Billboard yesterday that the company would announce their long-rumored music service - to be called Music Beta by Google - on Tuesday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. As has been reported recently, Google all but gave up negotiating with major record labels for licenses for a music service that included features like scanning and syncing a user's library. As a result, Google has decided to push forward without licenses from record companies and will offer a passive locker, where users can simply upload their music to Google's servers for storage but will not have sophisticated syncing and sharing options or an music purchasing platform. Thus, Google's music service looks remarkably similar to Amazon's cloud drive. In lieu of a built-in music store, Google will announce a new music playing app for Android devices, though the app will not be able to access music stored in Music Beta by Google, according to Billboard. Music Beta will be free to users, though will be available in the beginning only on an invite-basis. Users will be able to upload 20,000 songs to the Google cloud, and Google will likely roll out tiered pricing plans in the future.