Industry Insights: How production music licensing is changing

As part of our Focus on Music, we recently gathered a group of industry leaders to discuss production music licensing and direction for 2017.

This is the second part of our Industry Insights roundtable on production music, with this portion focusing primarily on licensing and fragmentation of media.

What technological changes do you foresee for the production music industry ahead?

“Predicting technology trends in the industry is the ever-elusive unicorn! There’s been so much advancement in fingerprinting and watermarking along with catalog management and distribution that it’s really the implementation and amalgamation of those technologies that will drive 2017,” said Whitney Arnold, VP Music Services at Stephen Arnold Music. “Single-platform services to search, deliver, track usage and process licenses and royalties will be the driving force in 2017.”

“There has been a growing request for stems, as well as more detailed metadata and tracking tools like Shazam and improved Cue Sheets,” said Anna Maria Hall, head of licensing at Killer Tracks.

“As more distribution channels are created and more clients requests stems of tracks, there will need to be more rigorous methods of identifying and reporting music,” said Alex Koch of VideoHelper.

“Many sites are adopting ecommerce functionality in line with other ecommerce sites on the internet,” said Ron Mendelsohn, president and CEO of Megatrax.

“Searching and finding the right track among thousands of songs is a big challenge, so hopefully technology will continue to emerge and improve to help people narrow search results down to the right piece quickly,” said Aaron Gant, SVP of Production at Warner/Chappell Production Music.

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