Eric Jensen

On Feb­ru­ary 8, 2011 The Cal­i­for­nia Copy­right Con­fer­ence hosted a panel dis­cussing the cur­rent state and future pos­si­bil­i­ties of the Latin music mar­ket, orga­nized and co-moderated by Eric Palmquest — Direc­tor, Dis­ney Music Pub­lish­ing and Marissa Lopez, Asso­ciate Direc­tor, Latin Writer/Publisher Rela­tions at BMI.

The panel featured:

Richard Bull — Pres­i­dent of The Sixth House, a man­age­ment com­pany with tour­ing, label, licens­ing, pub­lish­ing, and cor­po­rate mar­ket­ing arms.
Tomas Cook­man — CEO, Nacional Records & Cook­man Inter­na­tional, and founder of the Latin Alter­na­tive Music Con­fer­ence.
Yvonne Drazan — Cre­ative Direc­tor, peer­mu­sic
Nir Seroussi — VP, Mar­ket­ing and A&R, Sony Music Latin
Kike San­tander — Multi Grammy Award win­ning song­writer and pro­ducer, Chair­man of the Latin Acad­emy of Record­ing Arts and Sci­ences (LARAS) and CEO of San­tander Records.

Marissa Lopez (whose career began as a Latin radio DJ) kicked off the fes­tiv­i­ties with a mix of regional and Latin music styles. Although the topic of the panel was the decline in Latin music sales, par­tic­u­larly in dig­i­tal, the pan­elist were uni­formly upbeat and excited about the wide open future for Latin music.

Richard Bull and Tomas Cook­man have had strong suc­cesses with synch licens­ing and devel­op­ing strate­gic part­ner­ships with other com­pa­nies both inside and out­side of the music indus­try. The Sixth House’s part­ner­ship with peer­mu­sic has been par­tic­u­larly reward­ing for both par­ties. A com­mon theme was the need to exchange ser­vices and develop diverse part­ner­ships. Each sit­u­a­tion is unique in today’s mar­ket­place. Cook­man: “There is no right or wrong answer. If it works for you, it works for you.”

Pan­elists agreed on the need to con­trol mas­ter record­ings to sim­plify the process of clear­ing mas­ters and pub­lish­ing rights in one shot. Tomas Cook­man described his strong rela­tion­ships with music super­vi­sors as being build on his abil­ity to clear tracks for synch within a few hours.

Tech­nol­ogy has cre­ated easy access to a global mar­ket­place which raises the bar for music quality…the best music wins. Kike San­tander pas­sion­ately described how his com­mit­ment to music drove the deci­sion to start a label at a time when oth­ers a run­ning in the other direction.

Except for younger fans who fol­low edgier, alter­na­tive artists, the gen­eral Latin mar­ket has not been as quick to accept dig­i­tal down­loads. How­ever, this mar­ket skews much higher on the use of mobile devices accord­ing to Richard Bull.

When asked how to encour­age fans to engage in the dig­i­tal down­load mar­ket, Nir Seroussi stated that the con­cept of music own­er­ship is going away. Fans want music any­time, any­where, and labels must think of them­selves as ser­vice busi­nesses. The future lies in build­ing strong artist brands and alliances with a broad range of busi­ness partners.