The Association of Music Producers (AMP) has yet to give wide distribution to its new set of music production guidelines (SHOOT, 10/27, p. 1), but agency music producers who were consulted in the drafting of those guidelines, and were among the first to see them, give them high marks.
While those executives say that the need for such guidelines was not pressing at their shops, they applaud AMP for developing a formal document they can use to help them make points with creatives and clients. And they say the guidelines will be a boon to smaller agencies without music producers on staff. More than one called the guidelines "Music Production 101."
Lyle Greenfield, president of AMP, and president/creative director of Bang music+sound design, New York, says the association plans to mail the guidelines out shortly, so that interested parties will have them in hand prior to their official publication in the 2001 edition of the Assoc-iation of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Membership Directory.
"The guidelines evolved out of the initial meetings creating AMP’s agenda, just over two years ago," explains Greenfield. "This is our first step. We’re planting a flag here. We’re carving out some territory that we want to begin defining in terms of business practices for an area of the business that has basically been without them."
AMP was inspired by the AICP’s guidelines for commercial production, Greenfield says, and it was AMP’s affiliation with the AICP (SHOOT, 4/14, p. 1), that provided a major impetus in moving them along. Per the strategic alliance, which AMP and the AICP entered into this past April, AMP is able to tap into the AICP’s administrative resources, and the relationship allows the AICP to extend its reach into the music and sound design industry. AMP hopes that the guidelines, which are not a legal document, will generate dialogue with agencies and advertisers, and provide food for thought on the process of creating music and sound design for advertising. AMP expects that the guidelines will be updated.
The guidelines were compiled by AMP members whose companies are represented on the association’s national board. The contributors were Greenfield, Jan Horowitz, AMP secretary/treasurer and VP/ business manager of David Horowitz Music Associates, New York; Dain Blair, of Groove Addicts, Los Angeles, who is AMP/West Coast president; Steve Ford of Steve Ford Music, Chicago, and AMP/Midwest president; Jeff Rosner of New York-based Sacred Noise; Larry Geismar of North Forty Music, New York; Marc Blatte of Look/Scuba, New York; Alan Zahn of Red House Music, New York; Andy Messenger of Mess Hall, Montclair, N.J.; Kevin Joy of Rocket Music, New York; Nick DiMino and Jake Holmes of Three Tree Productions, New York; Mark Kehrberg of Crushing Music, New York; and Stu Kuby of JSM, New York.
Reaction
The process of creating the guidelines began in earnest over the summer, with AMP officials and key agency music producers meeting, trading phone calls and reviewing drafts, before signing off on the final document. So far, the guidelines have received a warm welcome from the agency side of the table. "It’s a real primer," says Peter Greco, senior partner/music producer at Young & Rubicam (Y&R), New York.
While many of the points may be obvious to experienced agency hands, Greco understands the need for guidelines. "There are things [in the guidelines] that are incredible statements of the obvious, but they need to be said. I think it’s designed more for agencies that don’t have music departments. Some people wind up getting in trouble, be it in copyright infringement issues or the issue of ‘Where does demo money stop?’ and, ‘When do you need to kick in some more money for additional work?’ "
Greco’s co-worker and brother, Paul, associate partner/music producer at Y&R, says the ideas expressed in the guidelines will help with the creation of music and sound design. "One hopes the process can be streamlined, with more accountability," he comments. "I think it’s good for the agency side and for the music supplier side. Having a guideline to the process before the process takes place makes a lot of sense."
Rani Vaz, VP/director of music and radio production at BBDO New York, says the guidelines are pretty straightforward. "I don’t think there is anything that is such new news," she observes. "It’s an educational tool for people who may not know how to approach music production. Music production can be a very scary thing for people who don’t know anything about it. It’s difficult to talk about. How do you budget for it? What does a demo mean? What do I get for that? How do I pay the musicians? I get a lot of calls from people at different agencies, or smaller music companies who have questions about what to do in a particular case."
Eric Korte, VP/music director, Saatchi & Saatchi, New York, says the guidelines focus on matters of paramount importance. "These [guidelines] are the issues we are all talking about in this business all the time."
Mike Boris, VP/executive music producer at Bates USA, New York, says that the guidelines are necessary to educate agencies without music departments; but he, too, welcomes them. "I’m in on the planning stages with just about anything that requires original music at my agency," he explains, "but this is something I could hand out to account people and to some select clients that are more educated musically."
Legal Rights
In general, the agency music producers say that the most noteworthy points in the guidelines deal with copyrights and avoidance of lawsuits for copyright violations. The AMP guidelines go to great lengths to point out the risks of using existing music as "direction" for music houses and composers, and of asking them to come up with "sound alike" music. The guidelines recommend that music houses not be expected to indemnify agencies and clients against lawsuits arising from sound-alike compositions, and that a musicologist be hired at agency expense to determine the likelihood of a lawsuit.
Dain Blair notes that a key goal of the guidelines is to make agencies aware of the problems involved with falling in love with a piece of existing music used for a rough cut. "Everybody does have to be cognizant of one big issue. That’s temping a piece of music to a rough cut and then sending it over [to a music house], wanting something that’s in that vein—and then constantly asking the music company to get closer and closer," Blair says. "All the indemnification contracts that come from the agencies ask us to hold them harmless. That’s not always the right approach if they’re asking us to [use] an existing piece of music [as a model]. I don’t mind indemnifying someone if it’s something we wrote from scratch and we felt was completely unique and original."
Peter Greco believes that music companies should not have to assume indemnity for an agency that wants something like the music on the edit. "Music companies are continually put in a really bad position by agencies in terms of modeling music after what’s on the rough cut," he says. "The music companies need to push back, as a community, against the wants of the agency or the client so they are not put in a position of being sued. We do the pushback internally at Y&R. It’s somewhat harder when it’s left only to the music house to push back against the agency creatives or clients. It’s that much more difficult, because you feel that if you push back you’re going to lose business. It’s an uncomfortable position for [the music companies]."
Vaz also cites the relevance of the guidelines on musical direction and copyright issues. "Item number four, about the use of sound-alikes and the importance of avoiding any exposure to those situations, is really important," she says. The point Vaz refers to, in part, reads: "…Caution must be exercised in the use of existing music as ‘direction’ for companies and composers. Copyright laws apply not only to the literal notes of music compositions, but to the sound of the musical arrangement, as well.
"Thus, there can be great risk—to the advertiser, the agency and to the music company—in making something "sound like" someone else’s song or soundtrack. Note that the use of published recordings without permission—even for presentation or ‘testing’ purposes—could be viewed as infringement of copyright law. Further, an ‘infringement’ claim can be based upon intent. Intent is often determined by whether a piece of music is ‘discoverable,’ i.e. has been laid back to a rough cut or animatic."
"People really need to understand what that means," continues Vaz. "Often, in this age of licensing songs, you sometimes will buy just the publishing rights for a song. It’s important to know that just because we buy the publishing rights, that doesn’t give us the rights to the actual sound of the master recording. We have to be careful."
Vaz and Peter Greco agree that consulting a musicologist is important when there are questions raised about a particular piece of music. (This, says Greco, is something that Y&R will usually pay for.) A musicologist can authenticate a track as not being too similar to an existing piece of music. Boris even recommends that the guidelines should include having some relationships with certain musicologists. "There are some musicologists whose word is really good and they have a great reputation. [Having a reputable musicologist] also helps if it goes to litigation," he says. "Their names carry weight. For the most part, it’s an afterthought and you scramble to see who is going to pay for [the services]."
Bidform?
The last item in the guidelines deals with the music estimate and the fees and payments that must be considered by agencies. The item in the guidelines suggests a standardized bidform, but reaction to that concept is decidedly mixed.
Boris and Vaz doubt that the points that spell out the cost components for music to be paid by the agency will lead to a standardized bidform, such as the one used by the AICP for production, and by the Association of Independent Creative Editors (AICE) for editing costs. "To have a standardized bidform [for music] would be tough," contends Boris. "Every project is so different."
Vaz just wants the points laid out in the guidelines to be taken into account. "Every job has different specifications," she says. "We need to be flexible and read through these guidelines and know what you need for your job."
Paul Greco doubts that anyone on the agency side would be opposed to a standard bidform, and Peter Greco points out that Y&R has its own bidform. "By the time we show up at the music company, the monies have already been allocated in a line-item fashion," says Peter Greco. "A standard bidform is good for everybody. It adds credibility to the music community. Everybody is reading off the same page. The idea is to model it after the AICP form. I think it would make sense for the music community to move in much the same fashion."
Blair favors a standardized bidform, but thinks that including it in the guidelines would have been premature. "We have to do some research and studying of a number of companies’ estimate forms," he explains, "and pick the best from all of them, coming up with one master that addresses all the things we need to see and the agencies need to see."
Business Concerns
While most of the AMP guidelines deal with business practices, the first point, on early planning of the music, and the sixth, on adopting a schedule that allows time for the steps in composition and recording, have implications for the creative process.
"The recommendation of getting music involved earlier has got to help—if we can just get people thinking that way," says Korte. "Every time I’ve pushed to get music involved earlier, it’s worked out for the better."
And Korte sees a connection between sound business practices and creativity. The routine of cutting film to a piece of music that becomes the model for what the music is supposed to sound like goes beyond creating potential legal problems, he says. "It’s not the most creative process in the world," he observes. "I don’t think it’s adding to the creativity of the musical process. We’re going to talented musicians and people at music companies, and instead of asking them for their pure creativity, we’re asking them to try to sound like something else."
Vaz says that issues such as making an early start are important to have in the guidelines, but she thinks they still fall in the "wish list" category. "That’s a great thing to aim for, but it’s not always practical," she contends. "Does getting somebody involved a month before you shoot guarantee you’ll have a better track? I’m not really sure. Often we don’t have a sense of what we’re going to need, either in terms of a composer or music direction, until we have film and until the cut is going, and then things always change a number of times."
Greenfield, though, is a believer. "If you take our initial advice and you get music and sound much earlier on in the production and pre-production stages, then the product is going to improve," he stresses. "And I think savings will be realized from the efficiency of doing that. We think that this art form, music, is an amazing craft. It’s complex and labor intensive and cost intensive. Not everyone’s best ideas occur at the last minute or off the top of their heads."
Slow Process
Overall, Paul Greco suggests that everyone in the commercial music business should not expect too much right away from the guidelines. "We should all be realistic," he says, "and know the guidelines are not going to be adhered to the letter, because a lot of these things we improvise as we go, anyway. But especially for some of the smaller agencies that don’t have music producers, having something on paper that we can look to as a guide is a good thing. It’s an improvement over the process."
And Korte recognizes that the guidelines will be well received by the agencies, but not treated as the law, which they clearly are not. "Agencies will say, ‘OK, that’s nice,’ but as to making certain things absolute policy, I don’t know."
Agency creatives sometimes feel, notes Korte, that if they can’t afford to license the radio hit or the music from a big movie that they really want, the music house route is akin to settling for a cover band at the Holiday Inn instead of the Rolling Stones. "This isn’t the case the majority of the time, but there’s the mentality sometimes that you’re settling for second best when you’re dealing with having original music done," Korte says. "In between the lines, I think what AMP is trying to do here is get people to rethink that mentality a little bit. And I’m all for that."e
