22 MusicWeek 02.08.13 PUBLISHING SPECIAL GUY MOOT INTERVIEW
LOTS MORE SONGS FOR GUY
It’s been a year since the deal that brought the Sony/ATV and EMI catalogues under the same publishing roof – and saw Guy Moot appointed Managing Director, UK and President of European Creative for the combined company. Here he describes life at the new market leader, and the role it hopes to play in building a bigger and fairer industry for all
PUBLISHING BY DAVE ROBERTS
So, a year on, how hard was the merger and what have the main benefits been? Mergers are hard work. I think people say the stressful things are bereavements, moving house, divorce etc, well this is up there. When mergers happen, there are lots of happy headlines and photos, but there’s a lot of work to be done, a lot of integration, a lot of culture to consider. But the fact that I worked with Marty [Bandier, Chairman and CEO of Sony/ATV] for 19 years, then obviously went through the Faxon years at EMI, I was hopefully in a good place to assimilate those cultures. It takes a while to get the people you want in the right places and for them to get used to each other. But, equally, everything in this business happens quite quickly, so a year on, there is a new culture. It’s not divisive: it’s a new culture for a new company. And key to everything is the people and their attitude. I have to say they've been amazing throughout the whole process. I'm sure everyone thinks they've got the best people working with them, but in this case I'm pretty sure I'm right.
What was key in overcoming any sense of ‘them and us’ - perhaps altering the way people, internally, viewed the company? There was a bit of ‘we used to do it that way, we used to do it this way…’ No, this is how we do it now, and everyone’s on-board. And that comes about through working together and doing deals together. You can’t just take a book away and learn each other’s catalogues. You have to enjoy the music, you have to make it fun. So we make a lot of effort
ABOVE
Digital awareness: Both EMI
Publishing and Sony/ATV took more direct control of their digital rights in Europe before the merger. The combined company has more recently made a similar move in the US. Moot says: “This is a hugely important era. Get it right and [the music industry] could see the good times again.”
“We now have a new culture for a new company. The staff’s attitude is key. Everyone thinks they have the best people, but I’m pretty sure I’m right” GUY MOOT, SONY/ATV
here to send out a lot of music, educating people about the two catalogues. It’s not like an exam, it’s sharing the music we love. We send out a song every day, with some funny commentary, and people want to play it.
So there’s a Sony/ATV ‘Song of the day’? Well, we call it ‘catalogue gems’, but yes, there is. I make the pick on a Friday and insist it’s one of the many dance tracks I signed back in the day. People might think I’m taking advantage and bending the rules but no, sorry, Friday is ‘90s dance. We’re looking forward now, we’re not trying to put things together or dealing with the difficulties of a merger; we know who we are, what we stand for and what we want to do. This is our take on publishing and we think we deliver enhanced value to our songwriters.
Which side do you think experienced the biggest jolt or culture shock - Sony/ATV or EMI? I don’t know if anyone did really. I mean I guess it was kind of odd after competing pretty hard and pretty aggressively against one another on new acts and writers, to suddenly be on the same side of the fence. But actually, although the competition was fierce, the principles and what we stood for were fairly aligned. I think perhaps the size of the EMI catalogue, even though you’re told ‘this is a big
company with lots of moving parts’, for some in the Sony world it wasn’t until the workload drops down that you really think ‘wow, this is a big company with lots of moving parts!’. We’ve found so many synergies across the
catalogue, which you can see in the charts now. I mean Emeli Sande’s album was a huge success for us of course, and many of the co-writers were signed with Stellar Songs, but there were also quite a lot of Sony/ATV writers on there, same with Lana Del Rey. And if we have a big hit with Emeli and Labrinth, again it’s EMI, Stellar, Sony/ATV. So both rosters are very well placed to put people together to write hit songs. And the business is about hit songs, it always has been, but more so than ever these days, when people have less time or inclination to devote 40 minutes to an album. That’s not to the detriment of artists or artistry, but the bar has gone higher; to take 40 minutes of someone’s time, you’d better have a very deep and compelling proposition. Albums are still hugely important, of course, but so are hit songs and I take huge pleasure looking at our reach in the singles charts and the airplay charts, not just here in the UK but around the world. The way people consume music has changed and as an A&R person you have to digest that, feel it and think it through. When we sign artists we spend a lot more time as publishers in the development process - filling that gap that maybe doesn’t happen so much at major record companies - and making sure that when those artists come to market maybe they’ve been through a co-writing stage, they’ve evolved, they’ve been supported and it’s their time, because in the record company cycle I think that process moves very quickly these days.
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