Eric Jensen

Tues­day evening’s panel at the Cal­i­for­nia Copy­right Con­fer­ence din­ner in Sher­man Oaks was quite upbeat con­sid­er­ing the many uncer­tain­ties of these times. The panel, mod­er­ated by Shawn LeMone, ASCAP’s VP of Film/TV and Visual Media, and Diane Snyder-Ramirez, VP of Roy­alty Account­ing and Admin­is­tra­tion at The Roy­alty Review Coun­cil, con­sisted of: Rus­sell Emanuel, CEO, Extreme Music Amanda Marks, EVP/GM, Uni­ver­sal Music Dis­tri­b­u­tion Patrick Russo, Prin­ci­pal, The Salter Group Kari Kim­mell, Record­ing Artist and Song­writer Vic­tor Rodriguez, Music Direc­tor THQ, Inc. The theme for the evening was, “synch licens­ing.” Tra­di­tional music indus­try bound­aries con­tinue to blur and each pan­elist dis­cussed evolv­ing prac­tices from their indi­vid­ual per­spec­tives.  Patrick Russo began the dis­cus­sion with an enter­tain­ment indus­try rev­enue analy­sis. The larger seg­ment is grow­ing and diver­si­fy­ing, although music rev­enues will con­tinue to decline. The good news is, music is ubiq­ui­tous and a key com­po­nent in a wide palette of enter­tain­ment prop­er­ties. This cre­ates new oppor­tu­ni­ties for licens­ing and pub­lish­ing rev­enues. Rus­sell Emanuel described the huge shifts in the music library busi­ness. The indus­try is mov­ing into what was once con­sid­ered inde­pen­dent label ter­ri­tory. Extreme Music is court­ing inde­pen­dent, niche artists (mostly song­writ­ers) rather than the more tra­di­tional jack-of-all-trades com­posers.  Vic­tor Rodriguez is pro­duc­ing video game scores with tra­di­tional film com­posers as well as scor­ing entire prop­er­ties from music libraries. Music is being licensed for vir­tual social net­works and mul­ti­ple co-branding oppor­tu­ni­ties are emerg­ing across media plat­forms. Kari Kimmell’s music has been fea­tured in over 100 film and tele­vi­sion shows. She con­trols her cat­a­log and han­dles the licens­ing and business…