In the new issue of Music Week, we speak to Jake Wisely, chief publishing executive at Concord to find out how, in light of their purchase of Imagem last year, the independent publishing powerhouse is planning on taking flight.
Now overseeing a publishing giant with over 300,000 copyrights on its books, Wisely told Music Week that Concord is currently inundated with people wanting to get involved.
“We really do have gravity now,” he said. “We get a lot of calls from [catalogue] sellers, administration clients, distribution clients, executive talent. It’s nice to be in demand.”
One of the key issues that Wisely and his team are moving to sort out quickly is the network of sub-publishers, since both companies had their own representatives around the world. In the UK, Concord Bicycle was represented by Bucks and that agreement ended at the end of 2017.
“There will be some winners and some losers, from both sides of the equation,” said Wisely, adding that by January 1, 2019, Concord will have “aligned” all its international collection partners.
Wisely is also looking at the most appropriate digital licensing schemes. In Europe, both Concord and Imagem were going through Independent Music Publishers’ E-Licensing (IMPEL), the collective of independent music publishers licensing Anglo-American mechanical digital rights.
“There’s a number of situations that we could pursue on our own or collectively with others,” says Wisely. “We believe that we will have a good scheme that we will enact through 2018.”
Looking forward, Wisely said he wants to focus on building an independent music powerhouse.
“We are entering 2018 and the best has yet to come,” he concluded to Music Week. “It’s amazing. It is pretty unreal to get to this scale and understand that we have investors that have no timeline, no horizon by which they want out. We are with the same investors that we met almost 12 years ago. We will have no shortage of opportunities to continue to grow and grow.”
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