Bruce Tweedie: A case study in globalised song licensing

By Bruce Tweedie, managing director of Music Mill

Globalisation has its critics these days, for all sorts of reasons – from the unequal distribution of the benefits, through to the sudden realisation that entanglement with dictatorships may not actually be that great in the long term. However, the ability to instantly communicate with all the players in the niche global ecosystem of music licensing has been a boon to everybody – from songwriters and artists at one end, to publishers, labels and music supervisors in the middle, through to agencies and brands at the sharp end.

It’s quite common for song licensing projects to involve people from various countries around the world. The norm is that there is a long chain of international approval – for example, there could be a supervisor in Australia talking to a local publisher, who might have to send the request to a publisher in London or LA or Nashville, who then has to contact the songwriters – who could be anywhere on the planet. Perhaps on their yacht in the Maldives.

But by any standards of globalisation this Case Study was a doozy. It started with a request to Music Mill from Hogarth in London to find a rock song from Thailand that would fit the script they were working on for a UK campaign for AMEX in partnership with British Airways. The main character in the TVC is an expat from Thailand who lives in the UK, and he hits a brick wall while working with his daughter to try to recreate Grandma’s Thai noodle dish. They can’t quite get it right, so they jump on a BA flight, courtesy of AMEX loyalty points, and visit Grandma in Thailand, who of course does get it completely right.

Now Thai rock songs are not so easy to find, partly because it’s not really a mainstream genre, and partly because a lot of the big South East Asia publishers and labels are based in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. So, we had a lot of back and forth with those cities, and their contacts in Bangkok, and eventually came up with a list of song suggestions. The client shortlisted a few songs and then we were off and running, identifying the rights owners and firming up quotes. Sounds easy right? Well not really – some of them were in Thailand and Malaysia, but we also had to track down and negotiate with various people in Hong Kong, the UK, and the USA.

As so often happens though, when the edits were done none of the songs were quite right, so we were back to square one. To cut a very long story short, in the end the anointed artist was the beautifully named Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band with a little gem of a song called “Studio Lam Plearn”. And they are a very interesting outfit indeed. Not just a band, but an entity that evolved out of Paradise Bangkok club nights across Europe, showcasing Thai music and relatively obscure tracks from other countries like Pakistan and Yemen, and then they evolved into a record label, and finally became a real band.

That meant we went around the loop again, tracking down a new set of rights owners. This time the journey took us to London, Montreal and Los Angeles, and in the end we nailed a deal that fitted the relatively modest budget that Hogarth had for the music. I personally had over 200 emails on this one – makes me think about all the rare stamps I would have collected if we’d done this in the old days!

Even though it took a while, everybody was very happy in the end. Jeremy Dunn, executive producer at Hogarth Worldwide in London said: “Bruce, you and the Music Mill team did a fantastic job for us on what was an incredibly challenging brief given the task of negotiating and licensing a relatively unknown Thai funk band for the BA AMEX campaign. We also had a challenging budget and timeline to contend with too, but at every step of the process you kept me in the loop and were always there as the brief evolved … as they often do.”

Johnny Watters, the executive creative director at WPP was faced with even more multi-country challenges, not to mention Covid. He was also very pleased with the final outcome, saying: “Who would have guessed that physical separation would actually bring us all closer together? Two very different brands, across both consumer and business, working collaboratively with us and the production companies, across different disciplines, different media, different platforms, shooting in multiple countries. All against the backdrop of the pandemic. Yet it all came together seamlessly. It was even fun. Which is a testament to our team, our clients, and the production companies. And a perfect example of borderless creativity in action.”

So, there you have it, globalisation at its best. When you look at the finished product, it seems as smooth as Thai silk – all those moving parts, with components sourced from all corners of the globe, working together seamlessly. Except that we all know that in the background a lot of hard work has gone into pulling all the threads together, and that it takes highly sophisticated skills by agency producers, music supervisors and many others to make it all happen.

It makes me wonder how we used to do it in the old days – when we first started this business all the communications were via fax! I guess everything just took longer, and we were all less ambitious about what might be possible. Now everybody expects all the insurmountable hurdles to be cleared away in the blink of an eye. Perhaps one of the downsides of globalisation is the never-ending growth in expectations? Nevertheless, it’s very satisfying when it all comes together in the end.