A Bit About How I Made It To 2021 — 25 years in production music

2021 marks 25 years since I started my production company, The Burst Collective. I’d been fired rather unceremoniously by my VoiceOver “employer” via FedEx. “Don't come in, the locks have been changed.” It was 1996. I'd move to Los Angeles very soon after that.

When I returned from California, I spent a year as the in-house advertising composer at Independent, an audio/video post facility downtown Milwaukee. Not too long after that in 2001 I bought an old post office building in the Wauwatosa village. It got a massive renovation as we designed and built-out the facility now known as Wire & Vice. So that makes 20 years in business for the studio proper. Twenty! How?

Creating three catalogs of production music along the way, I ended up selling each of them to a major publisher and wondered what would make sense as a next step professionally.

So in 2011, ten whole years ago now, I joined forces with someone I’d known in the industry for a bit (Dennis Dunn), and we launched this venture I’d named The License Lab. I presented the concept for a new series of audio cues that would never change tempo or key or mood, effectively just the “A” section of a song where the chorus (or “B” section) would never arrive. I called it UNDERscore. Dennis said he loved that idea, and then brought in the concept of adding some pub-published catalogs. We set out to be a player in the industry who would compete alongside the majors with whom I’d done these previous catalog deals and by whom he’d been employed. And I’d like to think we had a good run, made some waves, gained some respect among our peers.

When Dennis left a few years ago, it brought up in me some of the same questions I’d dealt with before The License Lab became a real thing… what do I want to do with my creative and professional life? What does success look like? Who do I want to work with? What types of projects motivate and inspire me? I knew I was not cut out for being a manager or administrator, handling “human resources” and payroll and a motivating a sales team.

If one were to create a list of skills firmly outside my wheelhouse, that’s a very good start.

So with the help of some trusted associates (employees of mine, collaborators, peers and mentors), I began working through some creative scenarios, with a wide range of possibility in front of us. I had offers to buy the company. I had offers to buy some of our music. I had suggestions to give up and fold, to consult other companies and help them launch. We had some interesting opinions internally about how the music licensing industry was structured and, potentially, lagging behind in the new online economy… so we explored online shopping carts and auto-generated PDF licenses, blockchain technology and how our assets could help a startup in that space really make a splash on the bleeding edge (but definitely bleeding, the industry doesn’t seem quite there yet), strategic partnerships with other music companies who are squarely outside the music library space, and even looked at subscription pricing models and the daunting realities of ramping up our customer support team.

In the end, all of that seemed like a metric crap ton of Stuff That Really Isn’t In Daniel’s Wheelhouse Or Skillset Or Passions Or Anything Approaching What He Wants To Do With Music.

So, I set out to find a way to treat the US and Canadian markets the same way we’ve been treating territories outside these borders for the past decade… as yet another region for our catalog of original music that needed a proper regional sub-publisher. That led to some calls among trusted peers in the industry, and after a few false starts and explorations that went nowhere for one reason or another, I ended up chatting with my longtime friend Ken Nelson (for whom I’d created the Velocity music library for FirstCom back in the day). Ken is now Senior Vice President of Global Repertoire for Universal Publishing Production Music, and brought their US brand ELIAS Music into the conversation, which fit my desire for an energetic and younger player in the space who also had major muscle and backing.

Given that our distribution deals in the UK and Australia were ending at the same time we were having these conversations, things quickly escalated into a worldwide opportunity with Universal Music. And here we are. We have handed off the sales and distribution efforts for our production music labels in North America (US & Canada) effective today, March 17, 2021, and there are some additional announcements coming in the next few weeks and months about specific territories coming online as our music gets added to Universal Music platforms around the globe.

The License Lab is now focused on content creation, and I’m looking forward to spending more of my time in the studio and less time with accountants.

There’s a bit more info at our Lab Notes channel for those who are interested.

I just wanted to take a minute to talk through some of how I got here and say thanks to those of you who have had my back through this whole season of change. I have the deepest appreciation for professional relationships which become real friendships. Thanks for reading this far, and Happy St. Patrick’s Day.