Scott Sellwood is the Sr. VP and General Counsel of RightsFlow, Inc. Prior to being at RightsFlow Scott was practicing law part time and playing in a band called “Saturday Looks Good to Me” who released albums on both Polyvinyl and K Records. I wanted to speak to Scott because of his unique career and because of RightsFlow’s new product Limelight. Read the rest of this entry »
Click here to watch a YouTube video of Scott Sellwood introducing RightsFlow at the Caribbean Cultural Conference.
Location: Brooklyn, NY
When: Friday, June 18th, 2010
Time: 3:00-4:10
Where: Medgar Evers College
1650 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
The Caribbean Cultural Conference is an annual event designed to bring together entertainment industry stakeholders to explore, examine the obstacles confronting the advancement of the Caribbean entertainment industry. Through dialogue among industry players, the CCC seeks to bring to the fore, strategies that will positively affect issues related to production, management, intellectual property, distribution and marketing of the Caribbean entertainment product.
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An amazing number of CD Baby artists have achieved success through their version of a cover song. Covers provide an opportunity to be discovered by fans searching for a well-known song. It’s a great way to introduce your act, and can open the door to someone discovering your original music, but you do have to acquire the rights first. In this episode, Scott Sellwood of RightsFlow walks us through how to properly license a cover song. Even if you have licensed a cover in the past for CDs, Scott helps to make sense of the different types of licenses needed in the digital age. Need to license a cover song? Check out the Limelight service by RightsFlow here – http://rightsflow.com/
Who gives you the right? If you’re a label, artist or music service of some sort, it just may be RightsFlow.
This NYC company was born in the bedroom of President/CEO Patrick Sullivan in 2007, and less than three years later stands as a fast-growing player in the digital music landscape. Seeing a need for streamlined mechanical licensing and royalty reporting, the company has quickly entered into license agreements with thousands of publishers who wanted an easier way to collect on the mechanical license monies that are owed to them.
On the other side of the coin, bands, record labels and distributors got a more efficient path to mechanical rights — so putting a cover song on iTunes, streaming a compilation album, or ringing up a Ramones ringtone would speed up.
SonicScoop hooked up with Scott Sellwood, their Senior Vice President and General Counsel, to get the down low on RightsFlow. A rockin’ guitarist as well as an international litigator, Sellwood can see exactly how licensing locks into the big picture.
Q: Why is a company like RightsFlow needed today?
A: Because obtaining publishing licensing in the US is such a challenge. You can go get the master rights from a few large record label conglomerates, but when you need to actually get the rights to the musical work underlying all those masters, you’re dealing with thousands of publishers.
Someone was needed in the market to provide access to all of those publishers. In short, that’s what we do. And we developed some technology that automates the process, making it a question of technology rather than person power.
So whether you’re a label, or a music service looking for rights to music that you put up on iTunes, someone like us is needed to get those licenses to play it. Once you have those licenses, you need to account for and pay those royalties, which requires an accounting department. A lot of indie labels just don’t have the resources.
So we’ll pay the publishers in accordance with their needs and specifications. Some want the royalty report on Excel, for example, some want it in another format. Everyone wants it in a certain way, and we automate the process soup-to-nuts.
Q: Mechanicals aren’t something you hear that much about, but they’re obviously important to RightsFlow. Why is mastery of mechanical licensing so important now?
A: My personal opinion is that publishing is one aspect of the music industry that can’t be downsized. The music industry is based on copyrights, and the musical work is already underlying the master recording. To grow the industry, especially in the digital space, we need to find ways to clear the mechanical rights as quickly and efficiently as possible so there can be more music online, and therefore more consumers purchasing music online. We want to grow the pot. I think that mechanical licensing is a crucial, crucial component.
Q: Interesting. So is that why RightsFlow was an attractive company for you to come and work for, with your background?
A: I’ve paid the bills over the last decade as a lawyer. And with my long history as a touring artist, it seemed to be the perfect interface between exciting legal issues — cutting edge legal problems — and a chance for me to maintain my connections with the indie music and artists.
And the concept of a crew of musicians forming a company to pay songwriters — what could be better? I got the spirit of it immediately, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.
Q: So let’s drill down a little. What companies do you target for partnerships – why would a publisher like The Royalty Network, who you recently connected with for instance, partner with RightsFlow?
A: The Royalty Network is a publishing administrator. They’re content owners. We spend a lot of time doing outreach to publishers, letting them know who we are, and letting them know if they tell us what songs they administer, it’s a lot easier for us to pay them. We represent around 10,000 indie record labels, as well as a number of online music services, and they are accruing royalties with the intent of paying songwriters.
For someone like The Royalty Network, who I think is a forward-thinking royalty administrator, if they come to us it makes it easy for them to license their content and get paid faster. It just makes the payment process so much faster. It’s pretty simple.
Q: Sounds simple to us, as well. So what are your challenges in signing up publishing partners?
A: On the publisher side, it’s our job to educate them. We let them know who we are, let them know we probably have accruals for them, and that our clients are often trying desperately to pay them. We pay 100% of the publishing royalties to the publishers, and our clients pay us to find and pay publishers.
We want to be the glue, the company that’s able to connect the record companies and other people who use content, to the publishers and the people who provide content.
Q: So, does this mean RightsFlow also works with boutique music companies, representing artists to ads and film? What interest would a music house like that have in RightsFlow, if any?
A: Well, we do some synch licensing for that type of work. It’s not our core business. We used to do a lot of that, but synch licensing is very complicated, and very difficult to scale.
Instead, we found that mechanical licensing is a need in the market, and something we can scale with the technology.
Q: Next question: Do independent artists only need to work with RightsFlow if they’re doing cover songs? Explain why an artist should know about you.
A: It can be expensive hiring layers, or spending your own time to find publishers and clear cover songs. That’s why we launched our Limelight service as a direct consumer service.
Anyone can come to us, pay $15, and get a license. It’s just that simple. We didn’t want to offer our services only to distributors who need 1,000,000 licenses — we also wanted assist an artist who just needs one license.
So for someone who wants to distribute a cover song they’ve recorded, all they need is Limelight. With little networking or launch, it’s really caught on. We’ve found indie labels who control their content are using the service when one of there artists tacks on a cover song at the end of one a record.
Q: OK, so a few years ago I obtained a mechanical license for a cover of “Secret Separation” by the Fixx through the Harry Fox Agency and their online service. Why would someone use RightsFlow and/or Limelight instead of Harry Fox?
A: Harry Fox can issue mechanical licenses for the publishers that they represent. We license through Harry Fox, as well, but also handle licensing for the thousands of publishers that don’t license through Harry Fox.
Q: What are the ongoing developments in the outside world that most affect your business i.e. Web technologies, legislation, the Harry Fox Agency, etc…?
A: That’s a great question. We have to keep tabs on everything. We’re involved in the pending negotiations between the publishers and the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), which is the RIAA for indie labels. We’re also involved in the copyright register’s efforts to reform the regulations for compulsory licensing – those have been negotiations between all of the trade groups. Those are the things we have to keep track of.
At the end of 2008, the royalty rates were set for streaming – per-pay royalty rates for an interactive stream – and everyone is trying to figure out how best to calculate those royalty rates. We’re working with our clients to help figure out how to best pay publishers those royalties. There’s a lot of moving parts – but it’s a lot of fun.
Q: Oui, that’s what I call ‘Grownup Fun’! Do you think being an NYC-based business help your overall business model?
A: It’s the hub of music. All the major labels are here, so many independent labels are here, so much American music is coming out of Brooklyn and NYC. Just being in a centralized location makes all facets of business easier — we have a number of European clients, and being in NYC give us access to the international market. It’s an exciting, vibrant place — I’m not sure we could do what we’re doing in Chicago. – David Weiss
Former Saturday Looks Good to Me keyboard player Scott Sellwood and his wife, Laurie, now live in New York City. But they return to Ann Arbor frequently — it’s where Laurie works for the University of Michigan’s School of Education, and where Scott’s veritable supergroup Drunken Barn Dance is based. They own a condo a couple of miles from U-M — too bad they can’t stay there. When Scott (a lawyer by day) took a job last year with New York-based music licensing company Rightsflow, they decided to rent their condo to brothers (and Quite Scientific label heads) Brian and Jeremy Peters, as well as Drunken Barn Dance/City Center drummer Ryan Howard. Because of Laurie’s frequent trips to Ann Arbor, and the accompanying hotel stays, the couple decided to rent an apartment in the heart of Ann Arbor’s student ghetto that’d be small even by New York City standards. Conveniently, it’s only a couple of blocks from U-M’s School of Education and, like any good touring musician, all the lawyerly keysman really needs is a floor and a bathroom to get ready for his next gig.
Four days of CMJ-sponsored panel discussions at NYU’s Kimmel Center last month saw musicians and music-industry professionals hashing out some of the most pressing issues facing the music business today. Not surprisingly, the monetization and piracy of digital music was a subject that came up in all panels, though (also not surprisingly) the issue was never fully resolved. Meeting one week before Google’s announcement of a partnership with MySpace, Lala, Rhapsody, and imeem to launch its OneBox music search engine, the panelists proposed a variety of remedies for the five-billion-dollar loss that the music industry has suffered annually, ostensibly due to pirating, since 2000.
Title: College Media Journal Music Marathon
Location: 60 Washington Square South, New York, NY
Link out: Click here
Description:
Summary:
Publishing is still an unsolved puzzle to some. When considering international hurdles along with the sprawling digital domain, we’ll have enough topics for a whole day. Whether you are a pro or just curious you will walk away with a fuller understanding of music publishing.
Other Panelists:
Charlie Feldman, VP, BMI
David Hoffman, Creative Director, Shapiro Bernstein Music Publishing
Justin Kalifowitz, President, Downtown Music Publishing
Paul Morgan, VP, Creative & Marketing, Cherry Lane Music Publishing
Scott Sellwood, Senior VP, Business Affairs & HR, Rightsflow, Inc.
Date: 2009-20-10
New York, NY – May 5, 2009 – RightsFlow, Inc., the leading mechanical licensing & royalty solutions provider for labels, distributors, and online music services, announces the addition of Scott Sellwood as its Vice President of Business Affairs and Human Resources. A former litigator and counselor with the San Francisco-based law firm, Farella, Braun + Martel, LLP, Mr. Sellwood will continue development of RightsFlow’s innovative licensing services while overseeing general business operations and managing internal human resource programs. He will also lead legislative efforts as the company expands its national presence. Mr. Sellwood further enhances RightsFlow’s presence in, and services to, the vibrant independent music community, having spent the better part of the last decade as a touring member of the critically-acclaimed indie-rock act, Saturday Looks Good to Me (K Records).
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