Today we have such a cool guest joining us! His name is Sebastian Wolff, and he has been involved in the video game music industry for over a decade, modernizing practices of rights management, royalty collection and assessing music publishing opportunities for game developers, publishers, and composers. Sebastian also co-founded the US mechanical rights company called Loudr, which was acquired by Spotify in 2018. In addition, he founded Materia Collective which is a leading video game music group that manages soundtrack distribution and publishing and produces CDs, vinyl and sheet music. On this episode we get deeper into the business side of the industry, talking about licensing and rights and how artists should go about making sure that they remain on the legal side of things. Sebastian explains to us what metadata entails and why it should be a top priority for any artists, particularly because of its revenue implications. He has so much more knowledge to share with us, so don’t miss out on today’s episode!
Key Points From This Episode:
- A quick introduction to how Sebastian got started in the exciting world of video game music.
- Finding Loudr and recognizing a need for licensing and rights assistance in the industry.
- Sebastian’s view on streaming and how it is placing a higher demand on the quality of music.
- How song covers contribute to the industry and what their legal implications are.
- The strict regulations around uploading cover songs on social media platforms.
- How to get rights for publishing and selling and the best companies to consult.
- What metadata entails and why it is so relevant to all industry role-players.
- Embedding your metadata and advice and how to approach and manage it.
- Why artists still need to register copyright, even before releasing their music.
- What Sebastian is learning at the moment and the book he recommends to everyone.
- How artists can increase their revenue and why doing the not-so-fun bits is necessary.
- And much more!
Tweetables:
“From almost like a free market perspective, it’s like every song needs to be good, you know? As supposed to in the old music industry, it was like, you could have an album with just a couple of hits and the rest would be fillers.” — @LEAHthemusic [0:07:59]
“Anytime you’re making use of something that you don’t fully own, you need a license or a per-mission of some degree and even if it is an email from someone who has the ability to grant those rights.” — @SebastianWolff [0:14:04]
“So metadata is more than an album title. It is also ISI identifiers, it is subtitles, it is translations, it is IPMs, it is ISNI numbers for artists, it is ISWCs for compositions, it is ISRCs for tracks, sort of all of these standards that are part of this music ecosystem.” — @SebastianWolff [0:23:20]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Sebastian Wolff — https://sebastianwolff.info/
Sebastian Wolff on Twitter — https://twitter.com/SebastianWolff
Loudr — https://loudr.fm/
Materia Collective — https://www.materiacollective.com/
Easy Song Licensing — https://www.easysonglicensing.com/
Harry Fox — https://www.harryfox.com/#/
Songfile — http://www.songfile.com/
DistroKid — https://distrokid.com/
Soundrop — https://soundrop.com/
SoundExchange — https://www.soundexchange.com/
I Will Teach You To Be Rich — https://amzn.to/2IND4SN
