40 Years Day #25 Wait to celebrate until the contract is signed…
David Caldwell
Experienced Executive | Strategic Planning | Leadership | Financial Analysis | Budgets | Nonprofits | Accounting | Team Building | Music Industry | Treasury Mgmt | Process Improvement | Project Management
When I was at EMI CMG our CEO Bill Hearn was the driving force behind the creation of the Christian Music WOW series (concept taking from the hugely successful secular NOW series). ?As GM of the Sparrow label which released the annual WOW double CD each year, I was always closely monitoring the publishing clearances (always the most challenging part) and master licensing as all of the contracts had MFN language.
As was common we would set a drop-dead date and at 5pm that day we would substitute alternative songs for any that had not been cleared (it was almost always publishers who failed to clear on time or would not agree to the 75% stat rate that was a requirement).? One year we had a top alternate from a small publisher that had been very excited about their writer/artist being on the album and had enthusiastically given their approval on the phone.? However, as we never received their “faxed” signed contract back and we could not reach them by phone again we replaced them with another alternate at 6pm so Jan Cook in creative services could get the artwork done and sent to the printer and Dave Parker could prepare the final master.
At this point a WOW CD would sell ~1 million 2-CD sets.? If you wrote a song the publishing gross payout would be $.091 x 75% x 1M or $68k and if you were the artist, depending on your contract, you would share in a similar amount.? Yes, this was around the year 2000 and fax machines were still quite the rage.
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The next morning our licensing guy got a call from the 1st alternate saying that after they had signed the contract, they put it in the fax machine, hit send and went out to celebrate.? The fax machine jammed, and the contract was never sent, and the opportunity was lost.? Failing to wait 1-2 minutes for the fax to go through and getting the confirmation before celebrating cost the artist/writer, their publisher and record label ~$150k of gross income as well as a LOT of ancillary marketing and publicity.
First things first…dot the i’s and cross the t’s before moving on…