12 MusicWeek 14.09.12 THE BIG INTERVIEWCAMERONSTRANG
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culture at Warner/Chappell as we move forward,” reflects Strang, who has just added long-serving EMI Publishing executive Jon Platt to his North American team. “We’re trying to bring some of my entrepreneurial background and some different approaches to the way we’ve traditionally done things, which are helping. The credit in general has been across the whole company. One thing about music publishing – and we practice it here – it takes a lot of people and it takes everybody paying attention to detail and doing a great job to have success.”
As successful as Strang was at Southside, he admits the sheer scale of Warner/Chappell when he arrived took him aback, putting him in charge of a company looking after more than 1 million songs. “I don’t think anything can prepare you for a
company of this size,” he says. “It really is just an incredible company that’s been built arguably over 200 years, but the amount of publishing and the amount of great songs and writers, publishing people that have worked here over the years and built the company is incredible and the diversification around the world in Italy, France, Germany, Argentina, the Far East was astounding. I wasn’t prepared for that. I don’t know how anybody could be.” Alongside the obvious size comparisons, Strang
STRANG LANGUAGE
Twenty months on from his appointment, Warner/Chappell chairman and CEO Cameron Strang is riding high after his company topped the US quarterly airplay market shares for the first time
PUBLISHING BY PAUL WILLIAMS
F
or Cameron the Prime Minister, Q2 threw up yet another set of bleak statistics with UK GDP falling by a worse-than-expected 0.5%. But for Cameron the music publishing executive the same period’s stats could not have been kinder as they revealed in the clearest possible way the progress his company had made since he joined them at the beginning of 2011. For the first time ever Warner/Chappell finished as number one publisher in quarter two in Billboard’s US publishing airplay market shares with a 17.1% score, reflecting not only successes such as Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know and Fun’s We Are Young but also a real new
ABOVE Cameron Strang: The founder of both Southside and New West Records, and co- founder of DMZ Records, Strang took over at Warner/Chappell in January 2011
momentum under its chairman and CEO Cameron Strang. “It definitely feels like we’re doing some things
right and people are really proud of the results. There’s a lot of momentum and a really positive feeling,” says the LA-based executive who at the same time as joining Warner/Chappell sold his company Southside Independent Music Publishing to the major publisher. However, not only did Warner/Chappell
acquire Southside, whose roster of hit songs includes Bruno Mars’ Grenade, Cee Lo Green’s Forget You and Kings Of Leon’s catalogue, but also the entrepreneurial approach adopted by Strang in how he ran it. That is now impacting on the day- to-day operation of the company. “I think we’ve really pushed to change the
suggests the other notable difference between major and independent publishers is the level of service given to songwriters. “Historically, majors in general tend to focus
more on the financial services they can provide at times and as the companies get large one of the challenges we have is to continuously come back to the level of service we can provide for writers, producers and managers and artists and the time we can spend with them and the focus we can put on their careers,” he says. Born in Vancouver, Strang first made his living
as a lawyer at a boutique litigation firm and when he then moved into the music industry it was starting a business from scratch – New West Records. It required all his skills as an entrepreneur, a word that is these days frequently used to describe the music executive but one he is more than happy to see alongside his name. “That’s essentially been my career,” he says. “I’ve
been very much an entrepreneur my whole career in the music business.” Those qualities really first saw the light of day at
New West and then Southside as he recalls the first four years of the business was simply himself and one employee, then two, then three and so on as it slowly expanded.
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