[Music Monday] How Going Digital Can Help Music Licensing

Today we're happy to announce Music Monday, a new column by Ario Tamat about the digital music scene. Ario Tamat had been in the music industry throughout the 2000s, being involved in the now defunct SoundBuzz and later Universal Music, dealing with digital licensing, distribution, as well as ringback tones. Music Monday will appear every week.

Recently, many people have been talking about the so-called "future of music', on how the music industry and/or the musicians can make money from music. A lot of focus has gone into mobile music offerings, music download services, and the music streaming services much heralded to be the "next big thing". They're all basically consumer-facing businesses, where the services - and the music companies partnered with them - attempt to monetize their music library direct to the music-loving consumer.

The music licensing aspect, however, is not talked about much, and even less understood. A music composition (created by a composer) or a music sound recording (recorded and produced by a record label or the artists themselves) can be licensed out to various parties who have corporate uses for the music; the most recognizable being music for television or radio commercials.

To use a song, say, by U2, you need to contact the record label, and the publisher of the song (who is basically a business representative for composers). But in my experience, it's a challenge to find the right contact at the record label, and an even bigger challenge to match the publisher (especially if one song has several songwriters who are signed to different publishers); and usually they won't be able to help if you still don't know which exact song you want. And if it's a popular song, negotiations and clearances take a long time, not to mention the high price tag that's usually attached. In short, it's a burdensome process. Attach that long process to the short lead times that advertising needs, and most of the time you end up with TV or radio advertising with music obtained from public domain sources, which might not be a good match.

Corbis, the photo-licensing service, has recently launchedGreenlight Music, which wants to take the ease of licensing photos through their service to music. With a large library, it's simpler for creative teams at advertising agencies to search for suitable songs - even listen to audio snippets provided on the site, as part of their creative brainstorming process - and once some song options are selected, they can either get the pricing immediately from Greenlight, or make an offer. Greenlight will take care of the rest, acting as a deal broker to the record labels and publishers.

The use of the website eases searching for available songs, finding out their status - if they can be immediately used or would need a longer process - and acts as an aggregator for business requests; and of course, it would only work if it also makes the music companies' lives easier in soliciting licensing requests, reviewing them and doing deal approvals at the click of a button. And that, is a good way to leverage internet technologies for the music industry.

Ario worked in the digital music industry in Indonesia from 2003 to 2010, and recently worked in the movie and TV industry in Vietnam. Keep up with him on Twitter at @barijoe or his blog on http://barijoe.wordpress.com