Contrary to popular belief, music publishers have rarely had the luxury of sitting back and watching the royalties roll in. And with CD sales in a seemingly perpetual swoon, publishers are being more creative than ever when it comes to finding additional income opportunities. And that’s great news for the writers they represent. These days, having a publisher on your team can mean the difference between getting by and going under.

Are your lyrics earning licensing royalties from being reprinted on T-shirts? Some of Universal Music Publishing Canada’s songwriters are benefitting from that arrangement. Company director Jodie Ferneyhough believes his company is one of the few publishers exploiting its catalogue in this way. UMPG works with various T-shirt manufacturers to put song titles and lyrics on Ts, jeans, belts — you name it. “We have a deal with a company that specializes in baby clothes,” says Ferneyhough, “and we tried to sell them on licensing ‘Born to be Wild’ [written by Mars Bonfire] but they didn’t go for it. Most of the titles we’re currently licensing are American, but I do have a Canadian company that specializes in lyric merch and we’ve licensed ‘Born to be Wild’ throughout North America. This is a great way to generate income — it’s just like a mechanical royalty.”

If CD sales have been tanking, electronic games have been doing boffo business. One publisher that’s done more than most in this area is Vancouver’s Nettwerk One Music. Recognizing that competition to license music for video games was hotter than ever, Nettwerk shrewdly partnered with the biggest name in the business, Electronic Arts. Last year, Nettwerk and EA teamed up to form Artwerk, a publishing specialist with one eye on electronic games and the other on sync placements in TV, film and advertising.

In March, EA’s worldwide executive for music and marketing, Steve Schnur, told Billboard, “We look at music as though it’s our responsibility to deliver marketing opportunities to the artists we sign. We have to take a central role in the artist’s career. We just can’t be passive and sit back and wait for stuff to happen and collect the mechanicals. It’s rare that I even ask, ‘How is the album selling?’ It’s not the first and foremost thing on our radar. It’s very tertiary to us.”

Schnur’s partners at Nettwerk have a similar philosophy. Company CEO Terry McBride says, “EA has emerged as a powerful publishing vehicle for emerging artists, with an A&R department that draws submissions from around the globe. It’s time for the music industry to shake things up, break out new bands and find new ways to expose them on a global scale. Artwerk is music 2.0 — it’s where music, games and digital entertainment merge.”

Like electronic-game sales, synchronization opportunities have skyrocketed in recent years. UMPG Canada’s Ferneyhough says that the writers doing well are those who embrace and welcome sync placements. And those placements are morphing as business practices evolve. For instance, UMPG writer K-os enjoyed a high-profile, not to mention lucrative, use of his track “Love Song” when mobile company Vodafone licensed it for a successful European commercial that never referred directly to the product. “The commercial was unique,” says Ferneyhough, “because the product was never identified. You just heard the song and saw a beautiful story about a mayfly.”

The Canadian advertising market has also changed radically in recent years and that’s meant big opportunities for songwriters and music publishers. Michael McCarty, president of EMI Music Publishing Canada, has teamed with a number of former jingle specialists to produce songs on spec for potential use in commercials. “There’s a current trend towards creating new songs expressly for ads — songs that aren’t jingles but that were custom-created for an ad.”

These days, McCarty is pairing his writers with former jingle specialists to produce ad-friendly music. What constitutes that kind of music? The target is always moving, since tastes and styles change from month to month and year to year, but some things remain constant. “Essentially, it’s a focus on tight structure,” says McCarty, “on bringing the hook in early, focusing on what really matters. It’s a discipline. I’m not saying this is the way everybody should do it all the time, but this kind of work has helped some of our writers sharpen their tools and take their work to another level. So even if it doesn’t pay off with landing a song in an ad, it’s already bearing fruit in terms of them writing better songs.”

McCarty is not restricting his innovations to the ad market. He recently expanded his staff by hiring Canada’s first social-media manager, Kat Lourenco. “Her job is to help our newer and developing artists/writers increase their presence on the Internet,” he says. “I’d assumed that most of our younger writers — because they’re from the digital generation — were really savvy when it came to promoting themselves online. It turns out that many of them aren’t. They tend to be great consumers of social networking but don’t necessarily know how to use those networks to their advantage. That’s where Kat comes in. She has experience in digital music and retail, and she’s got a real vision for how it should and could work. We’ve got some great ideas and medium-term goals to develop our catalogue using social-networking media to promote not just artists and writers but actual songs.”

McCarty hastens to add that “This stuff isn’t really new for us. We’ve always been a sort of invisible manager, invisible label, at varying phases of people’s careers. We thought of that as helping to enable artists to reach the public and a by-product was getting the attention of a record company and then the right record deal. More than ever we need to help our artists reach the public directly. Hopefully those efforts will result in the right record deal but who knows?

“Today, songs are getting placed and people are making money in spite of the fact that the songs aren’t out on a record and may never come out on a record. We’ve always been proactive and progressive in chasing opportunities — that’s what we do as music publishers. Maybe it’s just a shift in focus. It’s part of realizing we might have to help nurture things for a much longer period than we used to.”

Christopher Taylor Jones is the editor of Music Publisher Canada and writes the Publishing News column for Words & Music.

Uploaded Fall 2008

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