In an unusual move but interesting move, three Nordic rights collecting societies – KODA, TONO and TEOSTO – announced at Midem 2012 that they are joining forces to share the back-end for their IT services. The goal is to reduce processing costs while meeting the needs of their respective members.

Since 2008, Denmark’s KODA and Norway’s TONO have been working together to develop shared IT systems. Now Finland’s TEOSTO has announced it will join the effort. Together, the three organizations intend to expand and accelerate the plans for developing common back-end systems. Read the rest of this entry…

The annual Midem trade fair in Cannes features a number of pitch sessions. Advertisers such as EuroRSCG and Ogilvy provided briefings for upcoming campaigns.

On the TV front, music supervisors for NBCUniversal were overwhelmed by the response to one pitch they posted when over 2,000 tracks flooded their inbox. With a choice like that, they eventually found what they were looking for. But supervisor Alicen Schneider had this to say about the incoming music pitches: “a large number of the postings contained more songs than were feasible to review given the sheer number that awaited us and were also from genres that a little research would have shown are not right for any of our current shows (gospel, children’s songs, novelty….).”

The message is clear. Don’t waste the supervisors’ time. They are not going to change the brief due to the fact that you didn’t adhere to it! It doesn’t work that way round! One Pitch session is still open: agency Grey is looking for music for a worldwide campaign for a pain-killer. Check the details here. Deadline January 25. Midem will be held between January 28 and 31.

Atlantic Screen Composers (ASC) will go to the Cannes Film Festival 2011 armed with a huge investment fund, ready to inject much needed finance into film music. Set up in January 2011 to produce and finance music scores, it has funded 5 films and two animation series to date and projects that it will fund between 40 and 60 feature films during the forthcoming year, ASC will invest between $30,000 and $350,000 in individual productions in return for music publishing rights.

ASC is a fund associated and managed by the two founders of Atlantic Screen Music, former Pathe Entertainment FD Simon Fawcett and Tim Hollier, who built the world’s biggest independent film music publisher Filmtrax PLC.
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There are very strong forces currently attacking the PROs in Europe. Although many musicians now regret the death of collective licensing in the US, some parties are pushing for it in Europe. Are the UK and Europe moving towards a US model? Are we seeing a dismantling of the PRS for Music monopoly in the UK?
Are the record labels themselves helping the dismantling of collective licensing? What is the true role vs. stated position of the publishers? What would the consequences be for the creation and exploitation of music in Europe.

These questions – and hopefully more – will be debated at a major conference organised by Music 4.5 in central London on June 9, 2011. For details, visit Music 4.5.

Music licensing is a tricky subject at the best of times. For start-ups, it can be a nightmare. March 9 2011 is the date for a workshop focused on providing up-to-date practical music and content licensing guidelines to tech startups and agencies. The workshop will examine different kinds of deals ranging from streaming music, online campaigns, apps, video and games involving both music and content in various combinations. It will also discuss the new developments within the regulatory landscape to be aware of and their implications.

Two in-depth case studies of how it has worked for Last.fm and PureSolo will be presented and discussed. Read the rest of this entry…

An article in the Harvard Crimson pointed to a project run by Berklee and the movie studio Paramount. The studio has undertaken a massive programme to tag a database of old soundtracks from the 20s onwards, with the goal of making them available for licensing. There are mountains of music out there that cannot practically be used, as they cannot be searched. By tagging old soundtracks, supervisors will be able to locate and cue music from a very rich library that includes scores from films such as Star Trek, Forrest Gump, Chinatown, Mission Impossible, Love Story, and Airplane from composers such as Elmer Berstein, Danny Elfman, Philip Glass, Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone and others.

The idea is certainly good from a logical point of view, and one I recently put to a popular TV series. Why let good music lie dormant when it could be earning money? But a question that bothers me is who will be earning? Was not lots of this music composed “for hire”?

Continue reading on Examiner.com: Berklee students open doors to Paramount’s archives – Boston Movie News | Examiner.com and The Crimson.