Rich9

NIMIC’s seminar on Monday was reasonably interesting. It set out to cover ‘Sync’ aspects of music publishing, or getting your music on the telly and movies. In a music world gone mad, Sync deals and other publishing income are becoming increasingly more important both to the sustainability of your music career, but also to the profit margins of labels.

Savvy acts are keeping their publishing rights close and managing them carefully, not only to gain extra income but also to place their music in front of more listeners. Some may say its a sell-out, and certainly there are cases of people taking it too far (Moby, anyone?) however in today’s world, anyone who wants to make a career in music needs to see Sync opportunities and the like for what they really are. Seminar panelist Rocky from Oppenheimer made the point clearly: they simply couldn’t afford to stay on the road and record their next album if it wasn’t for money earned from syncs on Ugly Betty and the like.

The world too is becoming a smaller place, making it much easier to place music and track usage (and get paid) without giving up the farm in the process. In fact most record labels are increasingly turning to Sync as a significant part of their revenue stream. The dinosaurs will attempt to take as much as they can to the detriment of the artist, and the long term, however this could be the dawning of a golden age for the indies and a new breed of label to exploit recorded music, not just sell ‘records’.

Now that basically anyone can go and record a professional sounding piece of music, trusted ‘labels’ will become more and more important to cut out the clutter. The Vodafones and Fords all want that unsigned gem for their ad campaign, but will they really have time to visit 2000000+ myspace pages to find it?

For a while I was trying to see how labels could have a future post-P2P, but for those who have a plan based on a multi-disciplinary, long-term attitude the future is bright. The rest have been digging their grave for a while now, and very soon the hole will be big enough…

Rock on.

Categorized as music industry