she says. “We lost a lot of money because of how licensing was territorial. I used to have a visual image of the map of Europe with these ravines between France and Germany, and all of the money rolling off into the ravine.” Dyball built Warner/Chappell’s pan-European digital licensing initiative and was looking for an artist who would remove their rights from MCPS-PRS and bundle them to speed up the process. A Friday afternoon email to Radiohead’s managers, Courtyard’s Bryce Edge and Chris Hufford, fortuitously chimed with their desire to do something completely different having left EMI. It worked too, with the band’s publishing income soaring and making a “material difference” to W/C’s bottom line. “We just made it up as we went along,” says Dyball. “You couldn’t have done it with many people. I did say to Bryce, ‘This could all go horribly wrong’ and he said, ‘Yes, but it really doesn’t matter’. But they got their money much quicker, they didn’t have to wait for it to go through societies, and they could decide they wanted to license something and it could be done in 24 hours, anywhere in the world, all rights, master, publishing and performing. It went fantastically right.”
That success chimed with Dyball’s personal philosophy that “fortune always favours the brave”. “As an industry, sometimes we’re very cautious and we always look for things that could go wrong,” she says. “There have been periods when you look across the industry and see terror or [people saying] ‘I don’t understand the business I am in anymore’ or ‘This is all too hard’. That is sometimes an impediment and you just have to go, ‘What’s the worse thing that could happen?’” That attitude also, ultimately, led her to leave Warner/Chappell after she became bored with the slow pace of progress. Having turned to her trusty Music Week Directory once again, discussions with indie publishers about digital licensing led her to become the CEO of the MCPS, PMLL and IMPEL in 2014.
“I didn’t particularly want to come to MCPS,” she smiles. “But I did because I could see, quite clearly, what I thought needed to happen. So, you think, ‘Somebody has got to do it, it might as well be me’.”
When she arrived, MCPS was viewed by many in the biz as a dead duck. It certainly wasn’t staffed like a business with a future. “It was like Dad’s Army,” quips Dyball. “It was the very old, the very young and the infirm.”
Dyball took over the MPA itself in 2015, in part, she claims, to channel its extra resources into the MCPS cause. One revamp later, she now has “an amazing team”.
“I’ve never worked with such a bunch of happy people,” she says. “Except maybe when I was at Virgin – and that was primarily alcohol induced.” As you’ve probably gathered by now,
Dyball may specialise in the
backroom world of licensing deals, but
a conversation with her is never dull. The pink
18 | Music Week 12.11.18
streaks in her hair hint at the party person often spotted at industry events and her way with a one-liner could illuminate even the most tedious digital rights discussion. And, while much of her work at the MPA has been behind the scenes, it has been transformative. A new admin deal with PRS For Music significantly reduced MCPS’ costs and allowed it to pay down debt, while the society distributed more than £150 million to rights-holders in 2017. She has also boosted PMLL and helped IMPEL go fully independent earlier this year, as well as introducing peer mentoring schemes for publishers. As she prepares to step down in early 2018, she surely must be proud of her achievements? “That’s not for me to judge,” she says. “I can see all of the things we haven’t done! But I am proud of things like the YMPA for younger publishers and our mentoring scheme.” Dyball didn’t have a specific, hands-on mentor in her early career, instead forcing herself to overcome her natural shyness by absorbing lessons from those around her. “My kids say to me, ‘Does everything have to be a life lesson, Mum?’” she laughs. “And I say to them, ‘Yes, it does’ – and sitting in a boring meeting is a good life lesson. You can see how people behave and speak, who’s being listened to, who’s not being listened to. It doesn’t mean that you can necessarily transform your personality or your character. I could no more wake up and be Sas Metcalfe than I could wake up and be Lucian Grainge. But I could see how Sas behaved in her dealings with people.
“Sitting in a boring meeting is a good life lesson. You see how people behave”
JANE DYBALL MPA
“Some of the youngsters I work with have been brought up in a world where there are rules to get GCSEs, A Levels and a degree. They come into the business and say, ‘Where are the rules?’ I’m constantly telling them there aren’t any rules...” Ask Dyball if she was always a formidable character and she squeals: “No! Not remotely. For the first five years of my career I didn’t actually say anything to anyone!” But she certainly never ducked a challenge, quipping about negotiating with one lawyer who was “such a bastard I realised I was going to have to make friends with him”. “You have to work out how people behave,” she says. “I like a deal and I like trying to make money, I like representing people. If you’re inherently a shy person, you have that feeling of, ‘If I don’t speak up, I’ll never do anything in life at all’. I could quite easily be the person that is just at home watching telly and eating Hobnobs.” She’s had more than her fair share of dealings with the biz’s boys’ club too, but she never let it faze her. “I still sit in meetings where it’s me and 21 men,” she sighs. “I’ve been on trips abroad where I’m the only woman. You go out, have dinner, come back at 1am, everybody says goodnight and then the next day you discover that everybody, having got rid of you, has gone out to the lapdancing club. Do you think, ‘Fuck, I was totally excluded, that’s where they’ve done all the business’, or do you think, ‘Why would I want to be going anywhere near a lapdancing club? Why on earth would I want to be part of that gang?’ You have to work out what your battleground is going to be.” Dyball herself will be moving onto new battlegrounds in the New Year. At the moment, she claims to have “absolutely no plans” beyond eating some of those Hobnobs but, Dyball being Dyball, it’s hard to envisage such a successful campaigner being out of the battle for long. “It’s quite good to be unemployed occasionally,” she declares. “Although it was incredibly traumatic, if Richard Branson hadn’t sold Virgin I’d probably still be there now, earning 18 grand a year and going, ‘I love it!’ Every job I’ve done, I’ve thrown everything into. I can’t do it half-hearted, I either do it full-pelt or not at all.”
Note worthy: Jane Dyball is this year’s Outstanding Contribution winner
And with that, this year’s Outstanding Contribution winner heads off to dig out her trusty Music Week Directory and contemplate her next move. If The Stranglers are reading, they might just want to give her another chance…
musicweek.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64
