The IAEL Indie Summit Workshop at the MIDEM Music Conference at Cannes, France went extremely well. The speakers included Tony Morris, Partner at the British law firm Marriott Harrison, Mike Chadwick, Managing Director of Essential Music & Marketing, Kevin Arnold, Founder/CEO of IODA Alliance and Gray Gannaway, SVP of Business Development at CD Baby.
In the workshop, we discussed first the importance of starting with a good product. If you spend the time required to write great songs, cast off the lesser songs, and practice enough to perform them well, you will have at the least the best product you can make, which if you work on it, will stand head and shoulders above the rest of the available music and gain visibility just because of its merit. Great songs sell themselves. After this discussion, we delved right into the nuts and bolts of establishing an online presence and getting the best online distribution deal possible. Kevin Arnold from IODA and Gray Gannaway from CD Baby discussed exactly how the process works and the best way to distinguish your work to get the most out of the online services, and Tony Morris and Steven Masur discussed the most important deal points to get in the negotiation, including good rates, a workable term, the importance of good audit provisions and the rights reversion, or the ability to get out of the deal if it doesn't work out.
We then went right into physical distribution deals. Mike Chadwick discussed the importance of a good reputable label in these deals, and the stage to which a band must get before a good distributor will consider taking them on. He then discussed some of the problems that have occurred because of the market downturn and shrinking music business, including distributors shutting down and keeping your product in a warehouse. Tony quipped that sometimes it is useful to have a few large heavily tattooed men on hand to help you in these situations. In discussing the money made from merch at live performances, the usefulness of having large heavily tattooed men around to watch the collected money once again resurfaced.
After discussing the importance of having good audit provisions, we moved on to discuss some of the interesting new arrangements artists have started to explore in the arena of licensing, and how for some artists, this has become their most lucrative source of revenue, along with live performances. Steven discussed innovative sponsorship and licensing deals his clients had done with Verizon, Dell, and the Obama campaign, among other sponsors. Tony Morris discussed the venture capital model as it has been applied to funding his music clients, as well as his experience with major labels starting to sign artists with advances again, in order to stoke the creative fires and develop more of a bench of new artists.
The workshop ended with a Q and A, in which the point was made that once you have an online presence and digital and physical distribution deals, then every new licensing, promotion, or press opportunity you can do can lead to online and mobile sales which strike directly to the bottom line.
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