You have a diverse business background spanning across sales, marketing and business consultancy to touch on a few, How did your career journey lead you to music supervision?
A lucky accident! I always loved music but never dreamed of having a career in it. Then back in 2000, I was CEO of a Dot Com startup that crashed and burned, so I had a bit of time on my hands. An acquaintance was a music copyright expert and he and his wife had started Music Mill a year or so earlier. I started out by helping them with a bit of business advice, then one thing led to another and before I knew it I was enmeshed and became a partner. About nine years ago I bought out their shares, and over the years I’ve somehow morphed from a big corporate executive to an expert in songs and advertising. A very fortunate transformation.
What do you enjoy most about your job as MD at Music Mill?
Lots of things. Every day is different, every licensing job brings new challenges, and I love the problem-solving. Just being associated with all things music is fantastic – listening to songs, going to gigs, exploring new artists. Doing deals is a lot of fun. But I think the thing I enjoy most is working with creatives to really understand the profound relationship between a song and a creative campaign idea.
Tell us about a project you’ve worked on which you’re particularly proud of and why?
Ah so many to pick from. I love the ones where a client absolutely nails a song to their brand, and then over the years, the use of the song becomes iconic in the marketplace. A couple that spring to mind are Isuzu’s use of Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way”; and KFC’s use of Icona Pop’s “I Love It”. In both cases, the message and tone of the song is just a perfect fit. In more recent times, it was pretty special to get Van Morrisons “Days Like This” over the line for Tourism Queensland.
How is the Australian music supervision business different to other countries?
We’ve done quite a bit of work in the UK, and I do have a bit of familiarity with the US scene. A lot of the basics are exactly the same in all territories, but we have found that there are some significant differences. For example, in those territories, most of the agencies are big enough to have a Business Affairs Department which handles the contracts and often the negotiations, and that simply doesn’t exist in Australia. That means the agencies outsource all of the negotiations and paperwork to us, which seems like a more efficient approach.
The approach to music searches can be quite different as well. Certainly in London, the preferred approach seems to be to ask as many supervisors as possible to submit a list of songs for a relatively small fee. From our perspective that seems to promote a mad scramble, whereas here we do music searches for free, and we only get paid if we are successful with a song. In return, we ask for exclusivity, which allows us to take a very thorough and professional approach. I guess that only works though if the client trusts you to deliver the goods.
What developments do you foresee in music licensing/supervision in the next 5-10 years?
Smart young people have been telling me for twenty years that music supervision will die out and be replaced by self-service computers, but really I can’t see it. Every day I see how complex the negotiations can be, and how every campaign evolves as we work on it. That means the whole process depends on the human interaction between clients, agencies, supervisors, publishers and labels. Maybe Artificial Intelligence will somehow replace that one day, but I think it’s more than a decade away, maybe longer. So I think the fundamentals won’t change much at all.
On the other hand, the evolution of technology has dramatically changed the way campaigns are delivered this century, which has resulted in a lot more complexity in the licence specifications. TikTok is a good example – it didn’t feature at all until the last year or two, and now it is at the forefront of a lot of really complex negotiations. And I think that trend will continue – there will be more complexity in the licensing world as the use of tech in the advertising world continues to grow.
Reflecting on a challenging project you’ve worked on in the past, tell us about something you have taken away with you.
It feels like every single one of our many thousands of projects has given us a lesson or two. We have a very tight focus on learning from our mistakes, and it seems clear that has paid off, as we keep getting better. I say to our team that mistakes are inevitable in this business because there are so many moving parts, but we must catch them early, and figure out how not to make them again. Our business and workflow processes are a key focus to ensure we implement learnings as we continue to grow.
Why do you think music plays such an important role in advertising?
Many moons ago I did a degree in Psychology, and I think that’s actually an easy question. Like it or not, people make a lot of buying decisions because of how they feel about the brand, not because they have done an in-depth analysis of all the product features and compared them to another brand. (How can we have time for that anyway? Or alternatively, how do you do that for a beer?) So if brands want to make an emotional connection, what better medium than music? Music is a magical part of our world, it evokes emotion in ways that nothing else can.
For someone wanting to pursue a career in music supervision, what advice can you give on a good place to start?
When people ask me that I say, “find something else”. It is one of the hardest fields in the world to break into because everybody wants to do it and opportunities are very rare. Getting a junior position is like winning the lottery.
Seriously though, I advise aspiring supervisors to try to break into a publishing company or record label first – that is where the jobs are.
We’ve been going for about 22 years, and in that whole time, we’ve hired one person with a background in music supervision, four from publishing companies or labels, and only one (last year) as an inexperienced junior.
What is your personal highlight of your career so far?
If you really want a “personal” highlight I would pick the moment a few years ago when I invited my new wife Clare to join the business and become my partner. It’s always a risk for a couple to start working together, but sometimes a gamble pays off, and this one has been spectacularly successful, from both a personal and business perspective. We couldn’t be happier with the way we have worked together to improve and grow the business.
Interestingly Clare brought a whole new perspective to the business. Like me, she is a music lover with a background in IT, but prior to Music Mill, her career was more focused on Business Process Re-engineering, which has been incredibly helpful in our mission to improve everything about the way we do business.
What’s next for you and Music Mill in 2022?
We have invested a huge amount of time and quite a bit of money over the last few years in polishing the business processes and recruiting and training outstanding staff. We feel like we have finally got to a point where we have all our ducks in a row – we know exactly what we are doing, and how to do it in a consistently professional way. That is really starting to pay off now, so in 2022 we will keep focusing on continual improvement.
And in the bigger picture, I think we’ve weathered the worst of the Covid storm, and we’ll all come out the other side with stronger economic opportunities. Hopefully, the whole world will be happier, healthier and stronger.
“There will be more complexity in the licensing world as the use of tech in the advertising world continues to grow. ”
ABOUT BRUCE
Music Mill is a professional music supervision company – they have been delivering music search and sync licensing services to the Asia Pacific Region since 1999. They have licensed well over $100M worth of songs, completed thousands of sync licence negotiations and carried out numerous successful searches for songs to fit advertising campaign briefs.
Bruce Tweedie is the MD and co-owner, and is probably the longest serving continuous participant in any music supervision company specialising in advertising campaigns anywhere in the Asia Pacific region.
