Snippets of support for title developers

Warner Special Products, the licensing agency for the Time Warner Music Group, broke ground both in the music industry and in the multimedia world with its announcement that it would make available the master recordings of more than 50 music artists under the Time Warner label.

Music from artists such as Joni Mitchell, Ice-T, Graham Nash and David Crosby, Ted Nugent, Linda Ronstadt, Jesus & Mary Chain, and James Taylor is now available to multimedia developers looking to add some legal, quality sound to their next title.

Operators standing by. For $300, the company will license up to 30 seconds of music (only) to CD-I and CD-ROM title developers. To do so, you call Warner Special Products at (818) 569-0500 (don’t say we never gave you anything) and talk to a service rep who walks you through the procedure. Signing the contract obligates you to send the company a final product that it can clock against the sample you’ve chosen.

And while 30 seconds of R.E.M., for example, won’t get you too far if you plan to make an interactive CD about the group itself, a half-minute of the band’s early hit Orange Crush — which vocalist Michael Stipes says is about the use of Agent Orange — might make for very powerful background or introductory music for an interactive CD about the Vietnam War.

The opportunity to license these master recordings also gets title developers out of the rut of having to either to create their own music at costs that are often prohibitive, or use canned audio from a clip media company. Or, of course, steal it.

COME ON IN, THE WATER’S FINE

Perhaps the most important aspect of this announcement, though, is not in its details but in the deed itself. By agreeing to waive the high licensing fees that are normally a part of doing business with the music industry, as well as agreeing to circumvent the legal negotiations that often tie up licensing deals for months, Time Warner is sending out a clear message to other publishers: Come on in, the water’s fine.

“This is an effort to show the world that we are willing to make an effort for multimedia to succeed and not stand in the way,” says Mickey Kapp, president and founder of Warner Special Products. “Your people [title developers] are saying they can’t have access to copyrighted material, and now we are saying, ‘Okay, the road block is gone. What can you do with it?’”

At this point in the game, Kapp says, there’s no real benefit to this arrangement for Warner Special Products. “This is no deal. It is an effort,” he explains. “It’s $300 — it doesn’t even pay for the contract.” Of that $300, half goes to the Warner Special Products division and the other half to the artist.

We first heard about this deal months ago, but Time Warner refused to acknowledge its existence publicly. Why was the deal so hushed? “I am not trying to hype and promote multimedia. We are not trying to beat doors down and get people to use it,” Kapp says. “We have made it very friendly and inexpensive for creators to use this material and now it’s up to them to do something with it.”

Although it seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through — especially for more effort than deal, as Kapp says — he claims there’s no other motive than to see what multimedia producers will do when the handicap of audio rights is lifted by one heavy-hitting music publisher.

However, if lots of individual multimedia producers show interest in this type of licensing and it is perceived as successful, Kapp says he will let other artists under the Warner labels know that the experiment was well received and encourage greater participation. One can only assume that at that time, the teeny $300 price tag will bulk up a bit.

Although we had lots more interesting questions for him, Kapp wouldn’t comment further on the cost of developing the project to the contractual stage, nor the future of the project, nor would he discuss other artists who might be involved at a later date or the contents of the contracts that were signed by participating artists. We hope he’ll talk more later about a project with such great potential to change the way today’s largest rights holders do business.

Janice Maloney