With the rights to more than 1 million musical compositions from over 100,000 songwriters and composers assembled over decades from a diverse range of genres, downtown-based Warner Chappell Music Inc. is one of the oldest and most successful publishing companies in the music industry.

Properly administering that catalog as the landscape of the industry continues to change presents an enormous ongoing challenge for Warner Chappell’s leadership, as well as an enormous opportunity, particularly for Global Synchronization and Media Original Music Executive Vice President Rich Robinson, who not only helps get the company’s existing songs heard but also shepherds new and up-and-coming artists through the process of creating hits.

Robinson first joined Warner Music Group Corp., Warner Chappell’s New York-based parent company, in 2013, after stints at London-based music rights company EMI Music Publishing Ltd. and UK advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi Group Ltd. The cornerstone of much of his music business work was “sync,” or synchronization, which involves the licensing and placement of music to media such as film, television, advertising and computer games. He stepped into his current role in September 2019 with the goal of merging this lucrative division of the company with its Original Music department, which partners with TV broadcasters or production companies to create original music using writers unaffiliated with the show or the placement itself.

“Our department looks after all of those different media areas,” Robinson told the Business Journal. “How they use music in their productions and how we create music that works in that space, and that helps tell stories.”

His efforts have proved successful: Warner Music Group’s synchronization revenue represented 3% of its earnings in 2020 for the company as a whole, and as a division, it earned $144 million for the 2021 financial year, up from $119 million in 2020. Additionally, in the fourth quarter of 2021, synchronization revenue was up 39% year over year.

Meanwhile, the parent company’s total music publishing earned $761 million in 2021, driven in no small part by Robinson’s team’s efforts to get Warner Chappell artists and songs into a variety of media.

Behind the music

Although synchronization seems like an obvious process — an artist like Quentin Tarantino decides he wants to play Kool & The Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” over the opening credits of “Pulp Fiction” and pays for the license, for example — Robinson explained that there’s much more involved in the process of finding the right piece of music or artist for a project. He revealed that his team utilizes a “proprietary search system” owned by the company to help navigate that million-or-so songs it its catalog. More specific than the algorithms that Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music and other music streaming services use to make recommendations to subscribers based on past listening habits, Warner Chappell’s system can search according to lyric, theme, the number of beats per minute and a variety of other metrics to find what might work for a project, according to Robinson. His team then merges that data with their artistic expertise to identify the most appropriate or relevant options.

“We use a bit of technology, a bit of tangible data and then the human experience,” Robinson said. “Music sometimes is like a language that you have to learn, and what might be uplifting to you might not necessarily be uplifting to me. So, as my partner and my client, I would like to learn that language with you so that we can communicate clearly.”

While he declined to provide rates because they vary according to the kind of media, use and budget available from a production for licensing, Robinson said that his team does use an economic structure as a factor in their recommendations.

“Every piece of that business, we have somebody who’s the point person for our client to help develop that strategy and make sure they get the right music at the right price point and that we can give them options that work.”

From stewardship to collaboration

Looking at the last two years, Robinson said that much of the company’s licensing is happening in era-specific shows where the setting is key, from the 1920s to the ‘90s.
In advertising, meanwhile, he said that he has observed a sharp tonal shift in music
choices.

“During Covid, we’ve seen the tone of advertising change and what music works in that space change quite quickly from more reserved to one of emancipation and freedom,” he said. “So, we saw a real return back to the comfort of really well-known songs that deliver a message for us.”

Meanwhile, sync’s counterpart, original music, is also a little more complicated than its title suggests, enlisting writers from a variety of backgrounds who might not be artists in their own right to create songs or compositions that sometimes can have a longer commercial lifespan than their source of inspiration. For example, songwriter Rebecca Johnson co-created five original songs for K/DA, a virtual Korean pop-inspired group that only exists within the world of Riot Games’ multiplayer online game “League of Legends.”

The group’s first extended-play album “All Out” was released in November 2020, and its first two singles “The Baddest” and “More” both reached No. 1 on Billboard’s World Digital Song Sales chart.

“Under the guise of a character being the artist, but an original writer writing songs for it, that music had a lifespan outside of the game, and people became fans of the artist that was created,” Robinson said.

Warner Chappell has integrated its stable of writers into its operations to serve its clients as well as the evolving needs of the marketplace. In particular, Robinson said that diversity is a big priority for the company, and his team and international partners within Warner Chappell regularly collaborate to determine what trends work in different markets to learn and to educate one another. But ultimately, he said that choosing the right music comes down to the “intangible magic” that emerges from writers and artists working in harmony with one another, whether the collaboration happened decades ago or is just getting started.

“We want to be good partners,” Robinson said. “We really want to provide music at every price point; we want to be able to work deeper with clients to create original music but utilize the amazing catalog we have. And we see the future is that shift from what might be a traditional publishing model of looking after and administering rights to be able to be real creative partners with this landscape.”

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