Way back at the 2006 South by Southwest Film Festival, I found my way to an upstairs conference room to check out to what I hoped would be an interesting cross-section between the film and music portions of the event. The panel was entitled "Choosing Music for Film: The Creative Process," and the large room in which it was being held was half-full or so, with an audience comprised primarily of film students from the University of Texas. A smattering of industry types hovered around the edges of the scene too, ready to slip out should a call need to be made or taken.
A range of film pros made up the large panel—everyone from executive producers to composers—plus a few random guys from now defunct start-ups. Gina Resnick—producer of Female Perversions and Clockwatchers— was there, as was Mark Suozzo, composer for The Notorious Bettie Page. The sole director in attendance was Ron Mann, who made the apparently fabulous Tales of the Rat Fink, which I still haven't seen. The moderator was Doreen Ringer Ross, who moderates these sorts of panels thing on behalf of BMI all the time.
From the get-go, I could see that this panel wasn't going to be of much practical help to the aspiring filmmakers in the audience. They seemed, not surprisingly, to be wondering mostly about how to acquire the rights to use various types of music for their work. But the panelists' introductions alone took up a third of the allotted time, after which they strayed into the realm of amusing but not very informative anecdotes. Only Gina Resnick seemed to realize that some practical information might be helpful, at which point she tried to break down the steps of acquiring music rights for film. She's not a music supervisor or a DIY director though, so the info she presented was very general and she ended it by saying that "if music licensing were surgery, it would be brain surgery." (Not true, by the way) Another panelist advised audience members to "just hire an entertainment lawyer." I looked around the room and tried to guess what the average age of the audience members might be. I'd say it was about 22 or 23.
I started to become bothered by the fact that however unintentionally, the panel was presenting a really daunting view of the music licensing process to young filmmakers, so during the Q&A session I stood up and said that rather being brain surgery, I thought music licensing could actually be more of an outpatient procedure, and spoke a little bit about that. After sitting down, several people around me asked for my business card. After the panel officially ended, I was surrounded by people wanting it.
It was my first taste of what a strong need for this information on music licensing there is within the filmmaking community, and how difficult it can be to get. It's been suggested to me that industry folks deliberately withhold information in order to protect their positions within a competitive market, but I tend to think that what actually happens is that they're so experienced, they simply don't remember what sort of things true beginners really need to know.
In any case, I emailed one of the programming folks at SXSW to share my opinions on the panel with him, and he not only agreed with my feedback, he said that Magnatune (the record label I work for) might be able to host a smaller music licensing workshop at SXSW the following year. I thought it would be a great opportunity to present exactly the kind of uber-practical information lacking in the big BMI sponsored panel, but that would turn out to be only partly true. More in the upcoming Part II!
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