Recording - March 2016 - 57

Continued from page 54
or whatever.
At Lakeshore, we have a very small boutique,
in-house music library that is kind of a
hybrid. You know, I don't go out and have
people do cues. I don't want 30 or 50 second
stuff; I don't want minute and a half stuff. We
did a deal with somebody to buy a catalog of
that type of stuff, but we really haven't used it
a lot. But what we really do have and we do
use a lot is something I call our music supervisor's toolbox. It's real artists, real records, real
music that serves the purpose of doing a 30second needle drop when somebody's walking
into a restaurant or rolling through a car radio
and our producers say, "We don't want to take
the time or spend the money to go looking for
stuff. Why don't we have stuff in-house that
we can do that with?"

or Netflix or Amazon or whatever, I think that
you're gonna look at that and go, "We don't
really want to get caught up in that. It's probably just better if we start owning the music
that's being submitted to us, and we put it
into a library so that it's a cleaner value
chain."
I think the opportunities are still there, and I
actually think it might be better for songwriters for the fact that it's a lot easier to retitle
one piece five times, whereas if a piece of
music needs to be created five times uniquely,
that's more work for the songwriter and the
film producers.
So, you don't think the desire to have in-houseowned music libraries by studios, networks, and

production companies is mostly motivated by
profit?
Honestly, I think it's more from an administrative perspective. I think that people want to
do shows, lock them off as a unit, walk away
from it and it is what it is. If you're
downstream on the PRO side, somebody else
is figuring that out. Maybe I'm wrong, but
from what I've experienced-and my friends
who work in that world-it just seems to be
more kind of an administrative kind of problem that people don't really want to deal with.
And it's just cleaner to try and keep
everything as a single body of work.
John: Except when they start offering that
library to other shows outside of their own
company.

So the good news of that, from my perspective, is like I go out to Jeff for a lot of stuff. It's
not like my in-house music library is competing against what Jeff does, because he's got a
much broader reach. We have a very small
library that helps our producers in a very kind
of narrowband. I don't want to be in the production-library business; I don't want to do
that. I think that the networks and TV shows
are kind of struggling with this as well, and I
think it comes from a different place. I don't
know that the networks and TV shows and
other people really have an overwhelming
desire to be in the music production business
or the music library business.
I think it kind of stems from that other dirty
little secret that we all know about, which is
retitling. You know, retitling, pre-Internet era,
guys who wrote cues would write a cue and
then would deliver it to five different TV
shows under five different names, because the
producers want to have a rights buyout on it.
And in that era, when you deliver that same
cue to five different TV shows, there was no
tracking system.
So if I have a cue that works for one TV show
that works for five others, I just retitle it; the
producers get to register themselves as 100%
of the publisher; I'm still the writer on the five
different retitles of something. And I think
that what's happening with this digital fingerprinting and stuff like TuneSat, it's starting to
unravel, that people are now going like, "Well,
wait a minute. It seems like the same piece of
music is in five places with five different publishers, and it appears to be the same piece of
music." And I think that if you are on the
music production side of a television network
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