THE DIRECT APPROACH

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Industry directories are a must-have for music publishers. While they do not guarantee successful relationships with important industry decision makers, they do provide you with the information you need to make that first contact. The following list provides the name of each directory, its publisher's web site, and, where applicable, notes of interest.

A & R Registry, the Music Business Review (www.musicregistry.com). A comprehensive international directory of A &R staff and company executives for major and independent record labels. It also includes a useful list of music conferences and conventions.


Music Attorney, Legal & Business Affairs Registry, the Music Business Registry. A comprehensive international directory for contacts working in entertainment law.

Film & Television Music Guide, the Music Business Registry. An international directory of record labels, music publishers, film and television music departments and trailer houses, music supervisors, music placement and video game companies, composers, composer agents, orchestras, music editors, score mixers, music clearance departments, and more.

In Charge, Music Row (www.musicrow.com). This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date directory for the country music industry I've seen. Subscribers to the company's excellent Row Fax tip sheet also gain access to Music Row's expanded online directory.

Pitch This Music Directory,Pitch This Music (www.pitchthismusic.com). While this is a very limited directory for the Nashville area, it contains some exclusive, invaluable listings I've not seen elsewhere.

Producer & Engineer Directory, The Music Business Registry. Contains thousands of domestic and foreign listings for producers, engineers, and their agents.

Music Publishers Registry, the Music Business Registry. Do-it-yourself music publishers will find this international directory helpful in locating publishers for sub publishing and administrative deals. An administrative publishing deal is essentially one where a larger company handles royalty collections and disbursements, and sometimes licensing and promotion, for a smaller company such as your own.

Signing off for the weekend. More on Monday....

Eric Garland On The Movie (Music) Business

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This is so right on, so exhaustive and prescient, that I must send it to you and you must read it.

Ostensibly about the movie business, i.e. its challenging future, Garland states that past is prologue and we look to what happened in the music business to know how things play out in the film business.

The key passage is this:

"They will have to chase legal remedies, legislative agendas, all the way to what they view as being the end of the line before they say 'OK, so this really is the landscape we're stuck with. As much as we didn't want it, this appears to be it. Now we have to just dive in and make businesses that work here.'

And that's where music has only just arrived in this country and note it hasn't even come close to arriving in a lot of European countries. If you ask Universal Music Group in the U.K. 'Are you going to win this war on piracy?' They will say 'Oh yes, swiftly and decisively and soon. The rate of peer-to-peer infringement will be down 70 percent in the U.K. in the next few months. They have specific targets. Not here. We've exhausted all of those paths. There's a big gap. If the music industry in this country just now sort of arrived at the conclusion where they say 'We just have to play on this field even through it ain't home court and there isn't a lot of advantage.' And in some territories, music hasn't even gotten there yet, then how can Hollywood be there?"

The above comes from the answer to the final question of the interview, you can scroll down to there for full context, but you should really take the time to read from beginning to end.

In other words, who you gonna trust, the media titans or a guy who makes his living on the computer, detailing how people actually use the Internet?

Mr. Garland is not histrionic. He has no agenda, other than making BigChampagne profitable, selling data. Please don't shoot the messenger, pay attention to him!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10383572-261.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0