Five years ago, my father sat down one evening, opened Google and typed in the words “music businesses for sale”, which, as business acquisition strategies go, probably isn't one that would feature in many textbooks, but it was a search that was ultimately to change the direction of both my career and our lives rather considerably. At the time, I was looking for a change. I had spent 15 years working in education, including eight years as Director of Music at a large independent school, and although I was enormously proud of what I had achieved during that time, I had reached the point where I knew I wanted, and probably needed, to do something completely different. I didn't particularly know what that something was, but I knew that I wanted to remain connected to music and that I wanted an opportunity to put some of the entrepreneurial skills I felt I had developed over the years to use in a completely different environment.

And then Dad found MediaTracks.

An unexpected opportunity

MediaTracks was already a well-established independent production music company, which had been trading for around 20 years and had built both a strong reputation within the industry and a catalogue containing some cracking music. Tragically, its founder and owner, Steve Johnson, had died, and the company was essentially being kept in a holding pattern by his family while they looked for somebody who could take the business on and begin its next chapter. Steve's own story is an important part of the MediaTracks story, because music, performance and entrepreneurship were part of the company's DNA long before we arrived. Before founding MediaTracks, Steve had enjoyed a wonderfully varied career in music and had been the bass player in Lieutenant Pigeon, the gloriously eccentric Coventry group best remembered for their 1972 number one single, “Mouldy Old Dough”. It was a largely instrumental record dominated by honky-tonk piano which became one of the biggest-selling UK singles of the year, and Steve subsequently re-formed Lieutenant Pigeon in the 1980s, touring with the band and enjoying particular success, before later moving into documentary video production and eventually establishing MediaTracks.

I have always rather liked that part of the story, because the company we were considering buying hadn't been created by a large corporate music organisation or assembled as an investment vehicle; it had been created by somebody who had actually lived a life in music, performing, recording and producing, before using all of that experience to build his own independent music business. That also meant that when we bought MediaTracks, we weren't simply acquiring a catalogue of tracks and a collection of contracts, but taking responsibility for something that another musician and entrepreneur had spent years building, and I have always felt that there was a degree of custodianship attached to that. We wanted to respect what Steve had created while also recognising that, if the company was going to thrive for another 20 years, it couldn't simply stand still. There was, however, one fairly significant problem with this exciting new plan: I knew absolutely nothing about production music.

I was a professional musician and had spent my entire working life around music, but sync licensing, blanket licences, music supervisors, sub-publishers, metadata, cue sheets and collection societies represented an entirely new language. There wasn't really a training course or handbook when we took over, and we weren't given months of structured handover in which somebody patiently explained how everything fitted together. Instead, Day One consisted largely of being handed a memory drive, some passwords and crates of contracts, at which point I remember thinking, with some justification, what have we done?

Start by talking to people

One of the first things I decided to do was to speak to as many of the artists, composers and clients already working with MediaTracks as possible, because before deciding what needed to change I wanted to understand how the company was perceived by the people whose music it represented. I wanted to know what they thought worked, what didn't, what they valued about MediaTracks, what frustrated them and, most importantly, what they thought we could do better. Looking back, that instinct probably came directly from my background in education, where so much of my work had been about understanding people, spotting potential, encouraging them and trying to create the circumstances in which they could succeed. Although I had moved into an entirely different industry, it became apparent quite quickly that many of those principles were just as relevant to running a music company.

MediaTracks might represent a catalogue containing thousands of pieces of music, but behind every one of those tracks is a person who has written it, performed it, produced it and invested something of themselves in its creation. The technology, systems and commercial structures surrounding production music are obviously important, but one of the things I have become increasingly convinced of over the past five years is that, fundamentally, this remains a people business.

Learning by doing, asking and occasionally getting things wrong

The next few years involved an extraordinary amount of learning, much of which came simply through doing the job, making mistakes and being prepared to ask questions when I didn't understand something, even when I suspected that the question I was about to ask might be a particularly stupid one. There were registrations that needed correcting, terminology that initially meant absolutely nothing to me (and still doesn’t!), royalty statements that appeared to have been deliberately designed to confuse anybody who attempted to understand them, and systems that sometimes seemed to require a postgraduate qualification merely to log into them. There were also some rather less consequential learning experiences, including discovering during recording sessions that it helps if you put your headphones on the right way round. Fortunately, one of the things I discovered very quickly was that the music industry contains some extraordinarily generous people who were prepared to give their time, share their knowledge and point me in the right direction. Industry expert George Hyde, Paul Clements at the MPA, Simon Anderson at Audio Network, Lina Tebbs, formerly of Warner, David Newton at PRS and Ben Parry from London Voices are just some of the people who have offered advice, answered questions and encouraged me along the way, and there have been many others.

One of the most important lessons I have learned is that nobody builds a business in isolation and there is absolutely no shame in admitting that somebody else knows considerably more about something than you do. In fact, being prepared to ask those people for advice has probably saved us from making considerably more mistakes than the ones we inevitably made ourselves.

Realising that good music isn't enough

Perhaps the biggest change in my thinking over the past five years has been understanding that, in production music, good music on its own isn't enough. When I first arrived at MediaTracks, I naturally approached the catalogue primarily as a musician, so my questions were largely musical ones: is this well written, is it well performed, does it sound good, is the production strong and, fundamentally, do I like it? Those questions still matter enormously and there should never be any compromise on musical quality, but I gradually began to understand that they are only part of the equation. You can have an absolutely brilliant piece of music sitting in your catalogue, but if an editor can't find it when they need it, if the track title tells them nothing useful, if the metadata doesn't describe accurately what the music actually does, if the album concept is confusing or if the right alternative versions aren't available, then that brilliant piece of music may simply sit there undiscovered. That has fundamentally changed the way we approach A&R and catalogue development. Rather than simply asking whether we like an album, we now spend much more time thinking about why it should exist in the first place, who might use it, what sort of production it might work for, whether there is a genuine gap in our catalogue and, crucially, what editors, producers and music supervisors are actually telling us they need.

Over the past five years, I have learned to listen much more carefully to the people who actually use production music. Collaborating with editors has been particularly valuable because there is no substitute for seeing how somebody working against a deadline searches for music, what language they use, what makes them click on one track rather than another and what makes a piece of music genuinely useful once it is placed against picture. None of this means allowing data or commercial considerations to dictate creativity, because the whole thing falls apart without brilliant creative people making brilliant music. It simply means understanding that our job as a publisher is to give that music the best possible chance of being discovered, licensed and ultimately heard.

Changing MediaTracks

The MediaTracks we bought had a relatively small catalogue containing some excellent music and enjoyed a sound reputation within the industry, but it also became clear quite quickly that both the industry and the world around it were changing rapidly and that MediaTracks needed a much clearer direction if it was going to remain relevant. The catalogue was relatively narrow and traditional in its approach, while the artist roster was predominantly white and male, and that didn't sit particularly comfortably with me given my background in education and my belief that part of leadership is about creating opportunities for people who might otherwise struggle to access them. We therefore made a conscious decision to widen the net, not simply because diversity was something that looked good in a company statement, but because a production music catalogue should surely reflect the extraordinary range of people, cultures, experiences and musical traditions represented on screen. That journey has led us towards new artists, writers and producers, more authentic repertoire, partnerships with organisations outside the traditional production music world, educational initiatives, mentoring and writing camps designed to create genuine routes into the industry. It has also challenged us creatively because broadening a catalogue shouldn't simply mean asking the same group of people to imitate music from somewhere else; wherever possible, it means finding the people who actually understand that music, its culture and its musical language.

When I think about what I am proudest of after five years, therefore, my mind doesn't immediately go to a particular financial figure or television placement, although naturally we need those things for the business to survive and grow. I think about our MediaTracks apprenticeship scheme, the partnerships we have developed, our work with musicians with disabilities, and the collaborations we have created between composers and professional editors, because those are tangible examples of the sort of company we have been trying to build.

There is still a great deal more to do, and I would never pretend otherwise, but those initiatives are no longer peripheral projects sitting alongside the business; increasingly, they are fundamental to what MediaTracks is and what we want it to become.

Two very different backgrounds

Neither Dad nor I came from the production music industry, which initially felt like an enormous disadvantage but, with hindsight, may also have given us permission to question why things were done in certain ways rather than simply accepting that this was how the industry had always operated.

Dad brought decades of business, strategic and financial experience from operating at a very high level in a completely different industry, including experience of running businesses worth billions of pounds, while I brought music, education, creativity and experience of leading teams and developing people. Those backgrounds might appear to have very little to do with running a production music company, but we discovered remarkably quickly how many of the underlying skills were transferable.

Whatever the industry, there are still customers, products, budgets, investments, risks, relationships and people, and although music is unquestionably an art form, within our particular part of the industry it is also a commodity that has to be marketed, licensed and sold. Becoming comfortable with those two apparently contradictory ideas has been an important part of my own journey. Likewise, the transition from education to business turned out to be less dramatic than I had imagined because leadership remains leadership regardless of the organisation. You still have to communicate clearly, recognise talent, motivate people, manage limited resources, make decisions with incomplete information, accept responsibility when those decisions are wrong and create an environment in which people have the confidence to do their best work. The context may be completely different, but many of the principles aren't.

And then there are royalties...

Of course, it would be very easy to write a five-year retrospective in which everything has progressed seamlessly upwards and every decision has turned out brilliantly, but anybody who has ever run an independent business would recognise that version of events for what it was. Production music can be an extraordinarily unpredictable business, and cash flow, royalties, return on investment and systems have occupied considerably more of my waking hours over the past five years than I would care to calculate. You can spend money commissioning and producing an album today without knowing exactly when, or indeed whether, that investment will generate the return you hoped for, while a piece of music can be broadcast now and the royalties associated with that usage may not reach you until considerably later. When those royalties involve multiple territories, collection societies, sub-publishers and different payment cycles, predicting cash flow becomes even more entertaining. Sometimes we commission something because every commercial instinct tells us there is a demand for it, only to discover that it doesn't perform as we expected, while another album or track suddenly finds an audience or a series of placements that nobody could have predicted. And just when I think I have finally understood royalties, somebody introduces me to another revenue stream, territory, collection mechanism or distribution cycle and I realise there is an entirely new rabbit hole waiting to be explored.

Five years in, I am still learning how this extraordinary industry works, and I suspect I always will be.

Music is still music

One thing that hasn't changed, however, is my own relationship with music because, alongside MediaTracks, I have continued to work as a professional performing musician, playing the organ, working with choirs and giving concerts. Perhaps surprisingly, I have managed to keep those two musical worlds quite separate, and I think that has been important. When I am sitting at an organ or working with a choir, I don't find myself wondering whether the piece needs an instrumental version, better metadata or a 30-second cutdown, because at that moment music exists simply because it is music and I am a musician rather than a publisher.

Five years later

MediaTracks today is hugely different from the company we bought five years ago, and I am immensely proud of what we have achieved, but I don't remotely feel that we have reached the destination because the business, the catalogue and the industry around us continue to evolve. Technology is changing how music is created, discovered, searched and licensed, artificial intelligence will undoubtedly change parts of that process further, broadcasters and platforms are changing the way they operate, audiences are consuming content differently and the global infrastructure surrounding rights and royalties continues to evolve.

There is a temptation within any established industry to spend a great deal of time complaining about change, particularly when that change threatens business models or working practices that have existed for decades, but I would much rather try to understand it, embrace what is useful, challenge what isn't and work out where the opportunities might lie. Perhaps that is one of the biggest differences between the MediaTracks we bought and the MediaTracks we are building. Five years ago, we inherited a company with history, some fantastic music and a strong foundation created by Steve Johnson, and I hope we have respected that history while also having the courage to change the things that needed changing. There is something rather satisfying about the fact that a company founded by a musician and entrepreneur who had travelled his own unusual journey through the music business is now being taken forward by another generation who are trying to find their own way through an industry that never stands still.

I hope that, in some small way, we are doing what any founder would ultimately want the next custodians of their business to do: look after what has been built, respect where it came from, but never be frightened to keep moving it forward. There is still an enormous amount we want to achieve, and I suspect that in another five years I will look back at some of the things we are doing today and wonder what on earth we were thinking!

Five years ago, looking at a memory drive, a collection of passwords and several crates of contracts, I remember thinking, what have we done? Five years later, after all the mistakes, questions, royalty statements, cash-flow forecasts, new artists, partnerships, placements and lessons along the way, I can answer that question with considerably more confidence - we didn't make a mistake.

William Saunders
Creative Director & Co-Owner
MediaTracks Music