Two Go Mad in Cannes

In January, David & I went to Midem – a music industry symposium-cum-trade fair held every year in Cannes in the south of France. You can imagine the comments around the office when we announced we would be spending a week on the Mediterranean in the middle of a cold British January. If only it were like that. Although, I must admit, there was the odd lunch in the sun, it was pretty much full-on business, trying to secure rights and content to further expand the ever growing PureSolo offering.

Because we at PureSolo believe very strongly that the writers and artists whose music we offer are properly compensated, there is a whole web of rights and permissions which we must navigate to be able to comply with the legal requirements of a service like ours. We need permission from the Publishers to be able to display the sheet music or lyrics on screen, agreements with Royalty Collecting Societies in every territory for the payment of mechanical and performance royalties to writers (more on this in a later blog) and we need a network of producers and recording studios to prepare and record the backing tracks.

Because we need all of the above rights on a worldwide basis, Midem is an ideal place to make the initial contacts to start off the negotiating process. In that week, Publishers, Record Labels, Artists, Music Industry executives and online businesses from all over the World all gather together to talk, listen, argue and drink. Usually all at the same time!

Despite the general assumption that we would spend most of the week trying to get our towels on a sun lounger before the Germans arrived, we did actually have a very successful week. We managed to meet with Royalty Collecting Societies from right across Europe and as far afield as Canada, Australia and Brazil. We met with a studio company from Malibu who will now be supplying us with Karaoke backing tracks. We did a little socialising with our old friends from Faber Music and met the lovely Kathleen Marsh, CEO of musicnotes.com and generally got out and about – spreading the word about PureSolo and doing whatever we could to increase and improve the music we can offer and the places where we can offer it.