BMG Rights Management

They could be with Kobalt.

They could BMG, Concord.

And so there's all these sub-publisher relationships, and then it could be different by country and geography.

So, so basically, you've gotta take all the activity.

Like the first music deal we did, we got...

Was that with Sony? No, it was with BMG.

Okay.

After they weren't part of Sony at that point.

But they hired me back, and then I got fired a few months later for writing songs on the job.

Anyhow, but I signed a publishing deal, my first publishing deal with BMG about six months later.

And to the day, God's that good, right?

Yeah.

Anyhow, and Lord, one of the songs I was working on at the time.

Now, who do you

work with at BMG?

At BMG, Daniel Lee was my point person.

Not like dismissive, but was just so calm about it that like that stuck with me where I'm like, okay, this is just another thing I have to get through.

And so then I went to BMG, which was awesome.

How long did it take to get to land

that? Not a crazy amount of time.

Oh, we know, we heard, you know, it's like, cause word travels so fast amongst that like little bit of the music

industry.

And, and, and I remember just somebody being like, oh yeah, BMG, like I heard their hire and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

One thing led to another and I ended up working there.

Yeah

... also from BMG.

It will include Believe and TuneCore, which they've just done a deal with, but not quite in time for this launch, and also on user data, which is, uh, one of those things that is, it's, it's not entirely clear.

That could mean it's trained on all the music people made using those previous models.

Okay

...

so those companies, Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe Tunecore-

Okay

Ashley King has the story over at Digital Music News.

Far away from Nashville, Hartwig Masik, chairman of the Swedish music service HIFE and former CEO of BMG, the guy who got BMG back into the music industry after it sold out its stake in what is now Sony Music, is looking on the bright side of life right now.

In a guest editorial in Billboard, he laid out a number of reasons that the industry is actually in pretty good shape, even as it's faced all kinds of threats and the various disruptions of the past 15 years have left a lot of victims.

The major positives he cites are artist access to a truly globalized market, the democratization of audience building via socials, higher payouts percentage-wise to artists and songwriters, and in general, simpler and more transparent accounting.