Interviewed by Michael Laskow
I want to let you know that it’s extremely hard to pick a keynote speaker for this conference every year. The reason is because some of you are trying to get record deals, some of you are trying to get songs cut by major artists, and the majority of you, as it’s turned out over the years, want to get your music into film and TV. So…Wow, the sync industry, AI—scary stuff. And I thought who could I ask that’s considered to be highly informed, highly intelligent, and a really nice person? Then it dawned on me, somebody I probably met 12 or 15 years ago, and his name is Adam Taylor. He’s the president of APM, which just happens to be the world’s largest music library, with over 300 diverse catalogs, and more than a million tracks. He’s also the chairman of the Production Music Association. And as it turns out, the only way I could get Adam to join us today is by doing this interview on Zoom.
And with that, please help me welcome Mr. Adam Taylor. [applause]
Welcome Adam, and thank you for doing this. I’m really happy to have you here. Who better in these uncertain times? Let’s get right to it!
How many inbound requests does APM get on a daily basis for music?
Well, first let me say thank you for having me, and I’m sorry I couldn’t be there in person. Something came up, a family thing, and I had to be upstate a little bit. So, I apologize to everybody, but I’ll do my best here.
The numbers of requests varies and it depends on which department and the division. I don’t really know what the average is, per se, but there are days that we can literally get 100 to 150 requests a day from various people from all of our clients around the country. They come in the form of emails or texts or phone calls or Slack messages, or whatever—we have a variety of Slack channels. And we have a team of six full-time music directors who actually address those requests every single day. And some of those requests have multiple components, so there could be five or 10 different searches within one search.
“Overall, on average Hip-Hop, Pop, and Rock are by far the most requested and the most used.”
I don’t know how you could possibly know the answer to this question with that much music in the catalog and with that many requests coming in, but are there any genres that stick out as the most popular right now, because I know it changes?
Hmm. It does change. You know, APM’s mission and mandate is to be a comprehensive library, so the reason we have a million some-odd recordings—and to clarify, that includes versions. So, if we’re looking at original compositions [not counting alt-mixes, cut-downs, etc.] it’s only about 320 thousand, which is still obviously a lot and still the largest. But the mandate is to have real ref and def and quality in every one of those things. I often tell people that if somebody is calling you us and says, “I need something in the style of Miles Davis,” we ask, “Well, do you need early Miles or middle Miles or late Miles?” You know? Because they vary.
So, I would say that overall, on average Hip-Hop, Pop, and Rock are by far the most requested and the most used. Hip-hop is challenging sometimes, it’s hard to get really good, authentic Hip-Hop. When it has a vocal it’s very clear what it is, but when you take away the vocals, what’s remaining has to be very good to be able to empower the storytelling.
But we also do get a lot of requests for music for scenes. I don’t mean source music like a song that is in the show that the actor can hear, but I mean something that describes that you’re walking down the beach or something. One of my favorite requests that we got not too long ago is, “I’m running down the hall in a hospital feeling anxious but hopeful.”
I had to think about that for a second. Wow! So, the job of the music directors is to interpret that. We do that at TAXI, too when libraries reach out to us and say they are looking for a certain thing. There’s a lot of creative interpretation—kind of reading the tea leaves—that goes into finding the right music. It’s amazing how many people in my experience, how many people that request music have a difficult time articulating what they’re asking for, because music can be very visceral.
We do get that. And in fact, part of the job of the music directors is to help the client understand what they are looking for, and they don’t always know. It depends, there are different levels of expertise. If you’re getting a music supervisor in Hollywood, they know what they’re doing, and there are other people who are interns, and they may not be that experienced. We once got a request for “orange music.”
Doesn’t surprise me at all. Do you have any sense of how much of the music that you guys ultimately license is instrumental versus music with lyrics?
That’s a good question. I think that in terms of the amount of music that we have with lyrics, maybe it’s 20% with lyrics or something. And I would say more instrumental music gets used, but a lot of songs do get used. But sometimes when they decide that they’re going to use a song or a track with lyrics, they will often license it and then use the version without lyrics. Or they’ll go back and forth between them, depending… Remember, music and programming is supposed to facilitate storytelling, it’s not necessarily the story itself, although in some cases, some directors do, do that. But it’s supposed to empower, and there’s going to be voiceover on top, there will dialogue on top of it, so you don’t want it to interfere, so they’ll often take a song and mix between the instrumental version and the vocal. They’ll bring the vocal up and down, basically.
Twenty years ago, I had an article published called “The Musician Middle Class.” The premise was that musicians work hard at their craft and should be able to earn a living wage at a bare minimum, if not a healthy income like other professionals that have gone through years of training and education to develop their level of expertise. We’ve got a lot of TAXI members who create music part-time and earn a nice supplemental income doing that. Many of these people are working toward the day when they can leave their day job and do music full-time. We’ve already had several members who earn six-figure incomes from music licensing, and I’m sure there are many more six-figure composers in APM’s vast number of catalogs. Do you see any common traits amongst the people that achieve that goal of doing music full-time and earning a really nice healthy income?
There are always going to be exceptions to it, but I think that… The first thing is do what you do best, and work on what you love, find your own voice. If we’re getting a submission from somebody that’s just the same as somebody else and there isn’t anything distinctive about it, then in many cases another library isn’t necessarily going to be inclined to want to bring in another supplier of music. So, it’s important to really develop your own voice, and then to do that well.
“When you’re making a pitch, pick the style that you write in the most, and work on that first.”
One of the things that I tell people a lot is… I’ve had this experience where a composer or songwriter has approached me and said they would like to write music for us, and I say, “What kind of music do you write?’ And they say, “Well, I can do anything.” That doesn’t really help. I don’t know how many people there are who can write Hip-Hop, EDM, the classical Gregorian chants or Country music equally as good as the others. And even if they could, we then don’t know what to do with that. We’ve got a set of music that we need, the libraries that supply us our music are always giving us new music; we release a lot of new music every year. So, there’s a constant need for a flow of new music, but if somebody says they can do anything, well, I don’t know what to do. Do I recommend down this path or this path or that path? So, when you’re making a pitch, pick the style that you write in the most, and work on that first. If there’s another song you write, then work on that separately. My advice is to not try to do everything.
The other thing that I would say is that there is a lot of competition, so master your craft. Top-quality compositions, recording, mixing, mastering, I think that those are the things that you’re up against. The other thing I also advise is to go to the libraries that you’re interested in, that you respect, whether it’s APM or some other one. There aren’t any other good libraries out there, so just go to APM [laughter]—and listen to… For example, on our website we have a new-releases page, and you can look at the albums that have been released over the last few months. Go to one or a few that are the style of music that you write and listen to what other people are doing. And that’s going to set the standard, the bar, for what you need to do, but do it in your own place. So those are my recommendations.
All good recommendations. Yes, I’ve met that person more times than not, I think in my career, where you say, “What kind of music do you do?” “I do Rock, I do Pop, I do Disco, I do Classical, I do Hip-Hop, I do EDM.” They don’t realize that they’re sending up a red flag that says, “I’m a rank amateur,” because anybody who’s a pro would know not to say that. So, a word of advice to all of you in the audience: Don’t ever say, “I do it all.” Maybe three genres at most, and three genres that are somewhat related. You know, if you say, “I do Country, Bluegrass and slide Dobro instrumentals,” I’d believe you that you could be good at all those things. But I wouldn’t believe you if you said that you did Classical as well, unless your name is Steve Barden. Are you in the room, Barden? Yeah, there he is. Because Barden can actually do all that.
Let’s talk for a moment about royalty-free, the all-you-can-eat subscription model that has proliferated a lot over the last five or 10 years. Is this the future of the industry, or will the classic needle-drop model remain the standard?
“But if somebody is a pain, we’ll just work with somebody else.”
Before I answer that, I just want to say one other thing about working with libraries and what are the kind of traits and characteristics of success. I tell people that there are two words in the phrase “music business,” and so it’s not just the music, it’s the business. So, understand the business, learn it, understand it, and get familiar with how it works so that you are educated, and also, be easy to work with. There are people we’ve had who are just a royal pain. And this isn’t the commercial side of things, and it’s not an ego-driven business, which is why I love it so much. Everybody is really nice. But if somebody is a pain, we’ll just work with somebody else. So be easy to work with, that doesn’t mean bend over, but it means you have to consider the human aspect of it, that includes being timely, being responsive, you know, all those kinds of normal things.
In regard to royalty-free, I have a lot of issues with it as you can probably imagine. I find that in the royalty models that I’ve looked at I’m not sure how well composers do in those things in royalty-free, and if there’s no longer term annuity with the music… I should say first that it depends on what you mean by royalty-free. there is free, there’s performance-free, there’s complete buyout, so a person can use it forever. You know, some of these models of music goes into these things and gets used for a while, you have no backend, there’s no long-term thing that’s gonna come. And then when that music is no longer current, you’ve got no revenue flow, and you have to produce something else. Maybe you do it as well as somebody else or maybe not, or maybe they want new blood. I find that to be possibly and probably an issue for some songwriters and composers.
I think that on the business side, professional users, the companies that we work with, want a certain set of value propositions on their B2B side. And APM is a business-to-business company. We’re not doing business to consumers directly; we work with some other people who do take our music and offer it out. Some people can use it for UGC [User-Generated-Content], and we’re exploring a couple of other things in that area. But they want quality libraries, they want exclusive, they want new music, they want great customer service, a great website, all of those things.
So, in my own opinion, I think that traditional model of a professional service-oriented business delivering a set of value propositions to other businesses is going to remain. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some who are going to just go online and buy by credit card, because clearly people are doing that, but I think that’s a certain part of the market.
Yes. In my opinion, it’s an unfortunate part of the market, because I understand if you create user-generated content, somebody doesn’t want to license a piece of music for a thousand bucks for a wedding video, I get that. The catalogs that I’ve listened to—and I have listened extensively, and they’re brand-name catalogs that everybody in the room would know of—they may have music in them. Generally speaking, the music is not curated very well, the quality is not great and it becomes a problem. Because people who are not that professional yet—they are ramping up to that level of professionalism— they equate that kind of music library with a library like APM or any of the other great libraries that are out there. Oh, I forgot, APM is the only good one. Sorry. [Laughter]
Anyway, it bothers me, because people will say, “Well, TAXI didn’t forward my music to a brand-name library, but I got it into another library on my own.” Then I come to find out that they got it into a library that has almost no quality bar whatsoever. If it sounds even remotely like music, they’ll put it in their catalog. It’s troubling to me, and I think it’s eating away at the credibility to some extent of the entire industry, because you have a new generation of users that are being trained to accept lower-quality music, and less professional service. You and I should go out to dinner sometime and we can commiserate about that.
Don’t miss Part Two of this interview in next month’s Transmitter. We’ll discuss AI, as it relates to the music licensing industry’s future!