Industry Trade Highlights CMJ Panel Moderated By Patrick Sullivan, RightsFlow President/CEO And Featuring Lisa Tiver, SVP Of Business Development

By Dan Rys, New York, October 21, 2011, excerpt:

A discussion of new cloud-based models of music consumption kicked off Day Three of CMJ. Patrick Sullivan, president and CEO of licensing company Rightsflow, moderated a Thursday planed titled “That Cloud is Shaped Like a $.” Sitting with him were Lisa Tiver, VP of Business Development at RightsFlow; Elizabeth Moody, Head of Music Partnerships at YouTube; Jason Pascal, VP and Associate General Counsel at The Orchard; and Charles Caldas, President of Merlin B.V. Also involved in the discussion, from the crowd, were Duncan Hutchison, Managing Director of Blackheart Records, and Ray Farrell, U.S. representative for finetunes.

As the music industry shifts more from relying on selling records toward subscription-based streaming frameworks, Apple’s iTunes cloud model is being promoted and discussed as one of the primary potential avenues forward. As the panel put it, the industry is now transitioning from preventing people from doing what they want to do, in terms of guarding downloads and prosecuting those who pirate music, and toward a model of enabling music fans and finding ways to monetize that.

Read full article on Billboard.biz.

When it launched in the fall of 2007, RightsFlow comprised four people working out of the living room of president/CEO Patrick Sullivan’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.Today, the company has established itself as a disruptive upstart in the growing field of mechanical rights management, employing a staff of 23 and capable of processing licenses for 30 million compositions owned or administered by 60,000 publishers.

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January 22, 2011:  The discussions that take place each winter at MIDEM, the international music industry trade fair and convention, affect the flow of repertoire and income throughout the global music business long afterward.  MIDEM and the digitally focused MidemNet Forum open for business Jan. 22-26 in Cannes. More than 10,000 executives from some 100 countries and sectors—including recording, publishing, live, synch, digital and mobile—are expected.  Here’s how 11 companies, from several international markets, used MIDEM to drive business forward.7digital (U.K.)

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August 21, 2010 – Billboard’s Power Players special feature 30 Under 30 recognizes rising young executives who are driving our business forward with their artistic and business vision. In five previous annual features, 30 Under 30 has spotlighted numerous 20-something executive stars to watch. (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, then 23, was featured in 2007.)

This year, once again, you helped create this list. Our readers submitted nearly 200 nominations at Billboard.biz. Then a team of Billboard editors reviewed every eligible nomination and numerically ranked the nominees according to their achievements in the past 12 months and the nominees’ leadership within the broader industry, as described in their nomination. The alphabetical 30 Under 30 list here represents the collective wisdom of Billboard’s editors.

As in previous years, it’s notable that many of this year’s honorees are heading their own companies, often in the digital or branding space. Many others are in the touring business, which has proved to be one of the more resilient music industry sectors.

While certainly many outstanding young executives did not make our list, the nominations we received affirmed the wealth of talent rising through the music business, a strong sign of promise for the years ahead.

This year’s 30 Under 30 list:

Ben Cockerham
CFO/chief strategy officer, RightsFlow
Music licensing and royalty payment service provider RightsFlow is a company on the move, led by co-founders Ben Cockerham, who acts as CFO/chief strategy officer, and Patrick Sullivan, who is president. It reported revenue that was up 405% in first-quarter 2010, compared with the same period of 2009, while the number of clients has grown from 1,500 to 10,000. Cockerham, 29, has guided the company into background music, international rights clearance and reporting, master clearance, mobile clearance and user-generated content clearance. As RightsFlow has grown, Cockerham has helped shape industry discussions of copyright in the digital age. A graduate of New York University’s Stern School of Business, Cockerham met Sullivan at eMusic, where they conceived RightsFlow. “We thought there had to be a simpler way to license music and pay royalties,” he says. “And, lo and behold, there was.”
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The Royalty Network, an independent music publisher and administrator has granted a bulk license for its entire catalog to RightsFlow, a provider of bulk mechanical licensing and royalty services. The deal allows RightsFlow to more accurately identify, account, and remit royalties on behalf of their over 9,500 label, distributor, music service and artist clients. In other moves this year, RightsFlow joined the Digital Data Exchange (DDEX), which was formed in 2006 by major record labels, online music distributors and music rights societies to create standards to facilitate the exchange of metadata.

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RightsFlow, which provides mechanical licensing for labels and digital service providers, has signed a deal to identify and license PRS for Music works for mechanical uses in the U.S.

Since digital service providers began paying for streaming, subscription and advertising supported service in July, royalties can be held in escrow by DSPs, labels and aggregators. This deal can facilitate payment to the proper publishers and songwriters.

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New York, NY – April 4, 2009 – Despite the Copyright Royalty Board’s (CRB) amended determination on mechanical royalties for limited downloads and interactive streams, the leading trade groups involved in the June 2008 settlement that provided the basis for the rates say they plan to abide by the original settlement.
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New York, NY, March 23, 2009 – Sony/ATV Nashville has signed songwriter and producer Keith Stegall to a multi-year publishing agreement. Stegall has nine No. 1 singles to his credit as a writer, and 42 No. 1 as a producer, according to the press release announcing his signing He has produced a variety of albums that have collectively sold in excess of 60 million units, the announcement said. Currently, Stegall is in the studio with a new group, The Harters, and working on Clay Walker’s follow-up album to 2007′s Fall, among other projects that will soon be announced.
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New York, NY, March 4, 2009 – Licensing and royalty services company RightsFlow names Jason Walker manager of systems. He previously oversaw JWalker Sound.
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New York, NY, January 21, 2009 – RightsFlow has signed on three new clients for its Outsourced Music Licensing system, FLOW: CAM, Creazioni Artistiche Musicale, an independent record label and music publisher based in Rome; La Cupula Music, or House Of Music, an independent digital distributor based in Barcelona; and New England-based United For Opportunity, a company offering distribution and other services to the independent label sector. All three deals were announced at the MIDEM convention.
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