Recording - June 2015 - 56

Continued from page 55
"Heartfelt, hopeful singer/songwriter songs with
pop-rock sensibilities are needed by a new nonexclusive film and TV music company with a direct
connection to the executive producer of a primetime drama on a major broadcast network."
We screened probably about a hundred songs. We
found 10 that we thought he should hear. And this
is part of an email that I got back from him after
we sent him the music:
"By the way, I reached out to three members. Only
one got back to me and ended up getting signed
and pitched. Another one I talked to felt that it was
a little uncomfortable because the company was
brand new. I'm also shocked that some of the people have been members for much longer than I and
still don't know what non-exclusive and exclusive
means. To me that was mind-blowing, and I jotted
down these three things:"
"Why wouldn't you get back to somebody offering
you a deal? You joined TAXI, you paid the money,
and you paid the submission fee. You want to get a
deal, and then somebody shoots you an email or
leaves you a voicemail and says, 'I'm interested in
signing your music,' and you just don't get back to
them?"
"Why would you submit your music to a listing that
says, 'This is a new company' in the first sentence,
and then turn down the deal because the company
is new? Especially when it's a non-exclusive deal
and you really can't get hurt."
"How can you be a TAXI member for a number of
years and not know the difference between
exclusive and non-exclusive when I write about it
constantly. I talk about it on TAXI TV fairly often-
probably many times a year. It's covered at least 10
ways till Sunday here at the Road Rally every year.
How could you not know the difference?"
So that really underscored for me the need for this
panel. Tanvi, I know that you've had the same
issue. Tanvi has been running listings with us for
eight or nine years now, and one day she called me
up and said, "The strangest thing is happening. I
recently sent out a bunch of deal offers to people
in the form of an email, and only 10% of them got
back to me. What can we do?" So I ended up writing a little note that goes out with all her deal
offers to TAXI members, and it says, "This is a goldplated company. You want to sign with them." And
that upped the response rate to 50%. But still, it
should be like 98%. I can understand if somebody's
on vacation or they've got a family member in the
hospital, or whatever. But I would think everybody
would get back to you. So how does that make you
feel about TAXI and our membership at large when
56

people don't get back to you? Doesn't that cast a
bad light on them and on us?
Tanvi: I don't think any less of TAXI or the
members. At the end of the day there are great
musicians who are bad at business, and they are
bad at communicating. A simple "No thank
you" will work. I don't take it personally, and for
everyone that doesn't respond, there are 10 others that really want to be in the catalog. So I
welcome the ones who really want to do the
work and want to sign and see something happen for them. So you're shooting yourself in the

"You're shooting yourself in the foot
if you're not even responding [to an
email]. If you don't respond, it's not
hurting me, it's just hurting you."
-Tanvi Patel
foot if you're not even responding. If I have sent
you an email, I'm excited about your song. If you
don't respond, it's not hurting me, it's just hurting you.
Jeff, you're a man who has always got his ear to the
street, and you know tons of professional and amateur songwriters and composers alike. Am I nuts, or
do you see them making stupid mistakes that cost
them placements and income as well all the time?
If so, can you rattle off some of those mistakes that
you see very frequently?
Jeff: It happens all the time. Yeah, the communication is probably the biggest part of it. I don't
get a lot of responses sometimes, or the lack of
understanding the terms, or having someone
that can deal with that for them. There's nothing
wrong with being completely ignorant about the
business, as long as you've got somebody who's
handling the business for you. Of course, that
costs money.
But yes, people have walked away from stuff all
the time. They don't get back to me, and the second choice [song or track] gets it. So musicians
will walk away from $2,500, $5,000-easy
money for something small. But the minute a
car commercial offers them a thousand bucks
for something national-like insult money-
they jump all over it. That happens a lot. So like
you're kidding me, right? You're going to enter a
contest to get paid nothing to be in this car commercial that I know they're paying other people
a hundred grand for, and then they'll walk away
from the little one that takes two seconds to sign
it and it's done. And there's back-end money on
that. Car commercials don't always have that.
Steve, can you please tell the audience the difference between exclusive and non-exclusive?
Steve: Here's the difference. If it's a non-exclusive
library, it means you can pitch your music
through several different sources. Tanvi can
pitch it; Jeff can pitch it; I can pitch it. Exclusive
means that one company has the right to pitch

that music to the exclusion of everybody else. So
you sign with a company because you want them
to be your representative and no one else can
pitch the music. Maybe the company will allow
you as the artist to pitch it, because that's not
really competition with them. But exclusive
companies don't want other companies pitching
the same music for a couple of reasons. They
want to have the cache of the music that they're
controlling, but also, if four people pitch the
same song to a music supervisor, does the music
supervisor know which party they are going to
license from? It could be any one of us. So
there's the problem with non-exclusive. If there
are multiple people pitching the same music,
and a lot of times the music won't be identified
as to who pitched it, it'll just have the usual
meta-data, title, composer, publisher, all of that
stuff. So the supervisor comes out, or the editor
comes out and picks the song and they don't
know who to license it from, or they license it
from the wrong party. Or the four parties that
have all non-exclusive deals fight about it. Once
that happens the music supervisor will not
license from any of those people again.
What is going to happen when they finally get
around to using audio finger printing, or some sort
of unique identifier, and there is an instrumental
that is in four or five or eight catalogs? Wouldn't
that identifier be with all those?
Steve: Well, that's one of the problems. And it's
also a problem in the library business with people who retitle music. Is everyone familiar with a
re-titling model? I write a song, I give it a title,
I'm the composer, I'm the publisher, I give it to
your library or your company, and you retitle it.
I'm still the writer; you put down your publishing company name. Now there are two versions
of the same song.
Jeff: And you're still the copyright owner; you
haven't transferred a copyright.
Steve: Well, no, I haven't transferred copyright,
but they are listed as publisher and they would
get all the back-end money. So now there are
two versions of the same song with different
metadata. You get these digital recognition technologies that hear the song and go, "It's this
song." And it's either my song or their song, whoever registers it. Then if there are two of them,
the [performing rights] societies don't know
who to pay, so the money gets held.
He's talking about ASCAP, BMI or SESAC.
Steve: Right. And I've had situations where
clients have hired TuneSat, which does digital
audio recognition. They will scour the networks
and television shows to decide what music was
being played using this fingerprinting technology. TuneSat will send a report back to a client and
the client will go, "Hey, I never licensed that song."
Turns out somebody else licensed that song, and
Continued on page 59

Recording - June 2015

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